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Transcendentalists > Emerson > Quotes > Success
Don't miss: Posters on Success
One of the most popular quotations attributed to Emerson but almost certainly is not from Emerson. Here's the quotation on success and some thoughts on where it might really be from:
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As of now, it seems that the quote may be traceable to a 1905 publication by a Bessie Stanley. Apparently, in a collection of quotations on "success," her poem appeared on the facing page from a quotation which was from Emerson. Perhaps the mistaken attribution began when someone copied the source inaccurately from that collection. Here's a 1905 article from the Lincoln Sentinel about that version of the quote: Bessie Stanley's Famous Poem
Bessie Stanley's poem, though, is a bit different from the standard quotation attributed to Emerson -- and so there is still some tiny possibility that the quotation is Emerson's or someone else's and that Stanley's was a variation. At this time, though, the most dependable attribution would be to Bessie Stanley, with the changes attributable to the normal folk process of adaptation and editing.
If you find an authentic source of the quote
(that is, in an actual essay or work by Emerson published before 1905), please
with the information so
that I may confirm it and post the information!
All that said -- it just does not sound (to me)
like Emerson's voice. I leave the decision to you, dear reader, with a
link
to a page
with some of this information detailed, at
Dirk
Kelder's Emerson and Thoreau site.
For a similar story about the popular piece that
begins, "If I had my life to live over I would pick more
daisies," attributed to a Nadine Stair, see
this essay
by Benjamin Rossen.
Emerson did write about success; it is not now online but I hope to add it to the Emerson Central site soon.
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