Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius, never. And that is why the crowd, not altogether without reason, is so ready to treat great men as lunatics.

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

Every band I've worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they've gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

People have laughed at all great inventors and discoverers.

I admire anyone that follows the road less travelled.

I was always a rebel in the sense that I always wanted to go my own road and do something that nobody else has done.

Those who have accomplished great things in the world have been, as a rule, bold, aggressive, and self-confident. They dared to step out from the crowd and act in an original way. They were not afraid to be generals.

A great man is the man who does something for the first time.

I've always wanted to do things different, always wanted to be the person who stands out from the pack.

I feel like I wanted to run differently than everybody else did. And I want to do things that everybody else hasn't done.

I never wanted to be well-rounded. I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.

I can't think of one great human being in the arts, or in history generally, who conformed, who succeeded, as education experts tell us children must succeed, with his peer group.

The man of genius knows what he is aiming at; nobody else knows. And he alone knows when something comes between him and his object. In the course of generations, however, men will excuse you for not doing as they do, if you will bring enough to pass in your own way.

No one was ever great without some portion of divine inspiration.

In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.

Age, style, where you come from, where you were born, it's different every time, which, to me, is refreshing because it says that there isn't any one thing, one formula or kind of character that makes a great comedian. Everybody has had a different approach.

The most successful people are so original.

No man was ever great by imitation.

I always try to be a trend setter. That's what I always tell young people when I'm giving them advice. To go with their heart and don't follow the trends.

I really think that being yourself, being original, being outside the box is starting to be appealing to people.

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

My sensibilities are like, 'I want it to be weirder.'

I'm always looking at how I can be atypical.