Quote#Self
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did…
Quote byRalph Waldo Emerson · 1803–1882
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: Divinity College Address (1838), p. 26.
English (original)
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
More from Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.
I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.
Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.
Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
Slowly, slowly the Avenger comes, but comes surely.