A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, poet
Essay (1841), “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series, No. 2
More about this quote: wist.info/emerson-ralph-waldo/…
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'ö-Dzin Tridral 🏴 reshared this.
🇪🇷Götterdämmerung
in reply to WIST Quotations • • •Emerson, that great evangelist of the inner spark, whispering to each of us that our private flicker is a sunrise the world has somehow overlooked. A comforting doctrine: one's idle passing thought is not merely recycled cultural sediment but a suppressed masterpiece waiting vindication.
He flatters the mind with a subtle lie, that recognition of genius is recognition of oneself. In truth, it's the recognition of how unoriginal we are dressed up as revelation.
🇪🇷Götterdämmerung
in reply to 🇪🇷Götterdämmerung • • •we hear a profound idea & think, yes, I too have grazed this pasture, forgetting that the field has been trampled for centuries by better boots.
There's something almost endearing in this human reflex: to confuse familiarity w/ authorship. We don't discover truths; we stumble into them late like guests arriving after the feast, & insist we always knew the recipe. "Rejected thoughts returning with alienated majesty?" Better call it intellectual deja vu. An echo mistaken for a voice.
🇪🇷Götterdämmerung
in reply to 🇪🇷Götterdämmerung • • •Yes, his warning has bite. Not cuz we're secret geniuses silence by timidity but cuz we're cowards in subtler ways. We distrust our thoughts not out of humility but out of fear they'll be banal. So we outsource conviction to louder, deader men. When a stranger says it well, we adopt it eagerly, relieved that our suspicion of meaning has been professionally validated.
But originality is a cruel myth we cradle to avoid a harsher truth: thinking is less invention than inheritance.
🇪🇷Götterdämmerung
in reply to 🇪🇷Götterdämmerung • • •the mind is a corridor more so than a forge. Ideas pass through us, wearing our names briefly before moving on to someone more eloquent or more shameless.
Yes, abide by your spontaneous impressions if you must... but do so with the faint embarrassment of a person signing their name to a sentence history has already written a thousand times.
WIST Quotations
in reply to WIST Quotations • •-- Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:9