“To be great is to be misunderstood.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source: Self-Reliance and Other Essays

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Ralph Waldo Emerson 727

American philosopher, essayist, and poet 1803–1882

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“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

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Source: Self Reliance
Context: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

“Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.”

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“To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand; it is the cruelest trial reserved for self-devotion; it is what must have oftenest wrung the heart of the Son of man; and if God could suffer, it would be the wound we should be forever inflicting upon Him. He also — He above all — is the great misunderstood, the least comprehended.”

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“Since becoming a central banker, I have learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.”

Alan Greenspan (1926) 13th Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States

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“Never mind what I say. I am always saying what I shouldn't say. In fact, I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.”

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“At a time when even the most impoverished and underdeveloped states in the third world enjoy full sovereignty, Ukraine has practically none. This great discrepancy is a historical puzzle, one that calls for an examination of the often overlooked and even more frequently misunderstood past of Ukraine and the Ukrainians.”

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“Probably no agitation has ever attained the magnitude, either in the number of its recruits or the area of its influence, which has been attained by Modern Socialism, and at the same time been so little understood and so misunderstood, not only by the hostile and the indifferent, but by the friendly, and even by the great mass of its adherents themselves.”

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist

¶ 1
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Context: Probably no agitation has ever attained the magnitude, either in the number of its recruits or the area of its influence, which has been attained by Modern Socialism, and at the same time been so little understood and so misunderstood, not only by the hostile and the indifferent, but by the friendly, and even by the great mass of its adherents themselves. This unfortunate and highly dangerous state of things is due partly to the fact that the human relationships which this movement — if anything so chaotic can be called a movement — aims to transform, involve no special class or classes, but literally all mankind; partly to the fact that these relationships are infinitely more varied and complex in their nature than those with which any special reform has ever been called upon to deal; and partly to the fact that the great moulding forces of society, the channels of information and enlightenment, are well-nigh exclusively under the control of those whose immediate pecuniary interests are antagonistic to the bottom claim of Socialism that labor should be put in possession of its own.

“But Christianity in its doctrines has wandered widely indeed from the original thought of its great founder, for the reason that inferior men became its propagandists after the time of Jesus. While many of them undoubtedly were thoroughly sincere, some probably were intellectually insincere in the sense of attempting to impart as universal truths of nature what were the more or less vagrant ideas of their own minds — misunderstood and misinterpreted hints and flashes which they had received from the great source.”

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“The facts are indispensable; they are not sufficient. To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect. Even the experimental scientist cannot avoid being a liberal artist, and the best of them, as the great books show are men of imagination and of theory as well as patient observers of particular facts. … critics have themselves frequently misunderstood the scientific method and have confused it with the aimless accumulation of facts.”

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Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

“To be great is to be misunderstood.”

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