To be great is to be misunderstood.

The line comes from “Self-Reliance”, one of the essays in Emerson’s first collection of Essays (1841). Here he attacks our fear of contradicting what we said yesterday: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Speak what you think now in hard words, he urges, and tomorrow what tomorrow thinks, though it contradict everything you said today. He then imagines the objection, “Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood”, and answers with a list: Pythagoras, Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, Galileo and Newton were all misunderstood.

Right after, Emerson adds that no man can violate his nature: a character is like an acrostic, which, “read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.”

The essay, which also urges “Trust thyself”, became a founding text of American individualism. Its sentence on consistency is often misquoted without the word “foolish”, which makes all the difference. And this line does not claim that being misunderstood makes anyone great, only that greatness rarely escapes it.

Essays: First Series, “Self-Reliance”, 1841

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