Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes About Originality

• Insist upon yourself. Be original.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Creating, Funny Basketball, Originality

• Do your work, but do your thing.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Work, Purpose, Funny Basketball

• What is originality? It is being one's self, and reporting accurately what we see and are.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Self, Originality, Accuracy

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1875). “Letters and Social Aims”, p.161

• Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing-that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Reading, Two, Mind

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1876). “Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson ...”, p.144

• Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Greatness, Men, Originality

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1979). “Emerson's Literary Criticism”, p.163, U of Nebraska Press

• Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Creativity, Mind, Suffering

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1979). “Emerson's Literary Criticism”, p.164, U of Nebraska Press

• No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Education, Country, Art

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1404, Delphi Classics

You May Also Like:

Henry David Thoreau

Walt Whitman

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Margaret Fuller

Emily Dickinson

Edgar Allan Poe

Herman Melville