You can tell a fake Emerson quote, my friend Jeff Insko likes to tell his students, if the idea it conveys generally seems to confirm your own default assumption-something you think you knew already. “If anyone imagines that this law is lax,” he cautions, “let him keep its commandment one day.” But under the “trail-blazer” rendering engraved on innumerable tchotchkes, Emersonian self-reliance sounds as pleasant as a walk in the woods, something to do after elevenses. In “Self-Reliance” (1841), Emerson emphasizes how arduous it is to strive for nonconformity. The quote makes it sounds so easy to go alone. And yet the comma splice isn’t the only reason Emerson could never have written it. Then there’s this one I received from one of my favorite students ever, a discerning, sensitive reader who nevertheless gave me a brass compass emblazoned with the following advice:ĭo not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. I don’t need to source these quotes I know they’re all fake. Be led by your dreams.” “Beware what you set your heart upon, for it surely shall be yours.” Each quote accompanies a button you can click in order to tweet that good shit out. Wisdomquotes offers some similar pearls of purportedly Emersonian wisdom: “Don’t be pushed by your problems.
You’ll find that paragraph attributed to Emerson in books (like The Real Meaning of Success by Helen Exley or 1001 Ways to Stop Overeating, End Boredom, and Just Have Fun by Tracie Johansen ), on T-shirts you can order from Etsy on Facebook pages galore. People loved it and recycled it, and by 1951 Stanley’s winning paragraph was being misattributed to Emerson in a syndicated newspaper column by midwestern journalist Albert Edward Wiggam. Stanley, who was responding in 1906 to a contest held by the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette, which put its readers to the pointless task of defining success. lists it among the “500 Best Emerson Quotes of All Time.”Įmerson didn’t write it. To laugh often and much to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition to know that even one life has breathed easier because you lived. How can my students not realize that Emerson couldn’t have said that? Of all the adjectives that have been used to describe Emerson’s language - optative, orphic, aversive, even annoying - no one ever says “predictable” or “saccharine.”Īnd yet every fake Emerson quote leaves your feet sticking to the floor. We’ve read so much Emerson together by this point, usually near the end of the semester. The gesture is loveliness itself, but it also makes me feel like such a failed teacher of nineteenth-century American literature. From students I sometimes receive these aphorisms allegedly straight outa Concord, friendship’s offerings on the virtues of originality, or nonconformity, or ambition, usually inscribed on an object or written in a card. It’s always awkward when someone gifts you a fake Emerson quote.
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