A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam that flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his own thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a sort of alienated majesty. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
This quote was mentioned, very briefly, in Creative Authenticity by Ian Roberts. He says:
We are not mere receptacles of this expressive power. Things do not just pile up inside us waiting to be regurgitated. We are conduits of spirit, of the divine. The spirtual flows through us, endlessly. Emerson called it “gleams of light” which flash across the mind. They are seed ideas that need nurturing and developing. They seldom come fully formed. The doing clarifies them. That is what creativity is — the gleam that passes so quickly through our mind and the catching of it and forming it into something.
I went in searching for the full Emerson quote because I love the image of ideas gleaming across my brain. Doesn’t it feel that way sometimes? Those little sparks, those bigger flashes. Sometimes they’re hard to capture. Sometimes they’re beyond description. Sometimes, as Roberts says, it’s only by putting ourselves in action that we are able to create, using these gleamings for fuel.
