What Ralph Waldo Emerson thinks about creativity
American essayist and lecturer (1803 to 1882); began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston; author of essays including Self-Reliance, History, The Over-Soul and Fate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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4 dated positions, 1838 to c. 1841–1847, in their own words. Our reading of what Ralph Waldo Emerson has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsInsist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.
↗Essays, First Series (1841)gutenberg.org All 22 from this book
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Their wordsThe one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
↗Essays, First Series (1841)gutenberg.org All 22 from this book
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Their wordsFor it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
↗Essays, Second Series (1844)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsImitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.
↗Miscellanies: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Phillips, Sampson, 1856)gutenberg.org All 8 from this book