"Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors"
About this Quote
Emerson collapses the myth of pure originality with a sly, almost mischievous metaphor: everything we praise as new is assembled from prior material. A book is built from other books, a house from the dismembered body of the natural world, a person from inherited lives. “Quotation” is the perfect choice of word because it sounds literary and polite, then suddenly turns architectural and biological. It makes authorship feel less like divine inspiration and more like skilled recycling.
The subtext carries Emerson’s broader Transcendentalist tension: he champions self-reliance, yet he refuses the fantasy of a self made from nothing. Instead, he reframes dependence as structure. You are not diminished by being composite; you are legible because you are composite. The line quietly demotes the lone genius and promotes the mind as a clearinghouse where culture, language, and ancestry pass through and get re-formed.
Context matters: Emerson is writing in a young America hungry for its own voice, anxious about European cultural inheritance. This is both a corrective and a permission slip. Stop pretending you can escape influence; start choosing your influences with intention. Even the house image has bite: progress is never cost-free, because creation always consumes something else. The quote’s power is its equalizing cynicism disguised as uplift: originality isn’t ex nihilo, it’s arrangement. What distinguishes the alive from the derivative isn’t whether they borrow, but whether they transform the borrowed into something that can be quoted back.
The subtext carries Emerson’s broader Transcendentalist tension: he champions self-reliance, yet he refuses the fantasy of a self made from nothing. Instead, he reframes dependence as structure. You are not diminished by being composite; you are legible because you are composite. The line quietly demotes the lone genius and promotes the mind as a clearinghouse where culture, language, and ancestry pass through and get re-formed.
Context matters: Emerson is writing in a young America hungry for its own voice, anxious about European cultural inheritance. This is both a corrective and a permission slip. Stop pretending you can escape influence; start choosing your influences with intention. Even the house image has bite: progress is never cost-free, because creation always consumes something else. The quote’s power is its equalizing cynicism disguised as uplift: originality isn’t ex nihilo, it’s arrangement. What distinguishes the alive from the derivative isn’t whether they borrow, but whether they transform the borrowed into something that can be quoted back.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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