“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

—  Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source: Self-Reliance

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." by Ralph Waldo Emerson?
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson 727
American philosopher, essayist, and poet 1803–1882

Related quotes

Henry Fountain Ashurst photo

“Whoever in his public services is handcuffed and shackled by the vice of consistency will be a man not free to act as various questions come before him from time to time; he will be a statesman locked in a prison house, keys to which are in the keeping of days and events that are dead. Let me quote Emerson: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen.”

Henry Fountain Ashurst (1874–1962) United States Senator from Arizona

Johnson, James W. (2002). Arizona Politicians: The Noble and the Notorious, illustrations by David `Fitz' Fitzsimmons, University of Arizona Press. p 112.

Edith Sitwell photo

“The flames of the heart consumed me, and the mind
Is but a foolish wind.”

Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) British poet

Green Song & Other Poems (1944), Heart and Mind

John Lancaster Spalding photo

“How is it possible not to strive to know what the awakening minds of the young are eager to learn from us? It is little less than criminal that we should put them off with foolish speech or lies.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), pp. 183-184

“Consistency is the defense of a small mind”

David Eddings (1931–2009) American novelist

Source: The Seeress of Kell

Glen Cook photo

“Consistency is the sign of a narrow mind.”

Glen Cook (1944) American fiction writer
Yuval Noah Harari photo

“Consistency is the playground of dull minds.”

Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Marcus Aurelius photo

“I consist of a little body and a soul.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

VI, 32
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VI

Aldous Huxley photo

“Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Wordsworth in the Tropics" in Do What You Will (1929)
Source: Do What You Will: Twelve Essays
Context: Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death.

Marcus Tullius Cicero photo

“A happy life consists in tranquility of mind.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman
Alphonsus Maria de' Liguori photo

“Let us examine in what true wisdom consists, and we shall see, in the first point, that sinners are truly foolish, and, in the second, that the saints are truly wise.”

Alphonsus Maria de' Liguori (1696–1787) Italian Catholic bishop, spiritual writer, composer, musician, artist, poet, lawyer, scholastic philosopher…

Liguori, A. M. (1882). Sunday within the Octave of the Nativity: In What True Wisdom Consists. In N. Callan (Trans.), Sermons for All the Sundays in the Year (Eighth Edition, p. 43). Dublin; London: James Duffy & Sons.

Related topics