You Won’t Be Understood—and Thank God!

Else, if you would be a man, speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. Ah … 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. —From Self-Reliance

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) was a philosopher, poet, preacher, and one of the founders of American thought.