A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored…

In “Self-Reliance”, Emerson names two terrors that keep us from trusting ourselves: the displeasure of the crowd, and “our consistency”, a reverence for our past words and acts because others judge us by them. “Why drag about this corpse of your memory?” he asks. Better to drop an outgrown theory the way the biblical Joseph fled, leaving his coat in the hands of Potiphar’s wife. Then comes the line, and the famous advice that follows: speak what you think now “in hard words”, and tomorrow what tomorrow thinks, “though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” To the objection that you will be misunderstood, he replies: “To be great is to be misunderstood.”

The essay appeared in 1841 in Emerson’s Essays: First Series. The line is often quoted in a shortened form, “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”, which drops the key word. Emerson does not condemn all consistency, only the foolish kind that binds us to our past instead of to the truth. A hobgoblin is a goblin, a bogey.

Self-Reliance (Essays: First Series), 1841

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