Who said this?

Famous sayings get famous in the first place, not because they are worthy of fame, but because they are uttered by famous people……………Ralph Waldo Emerson

As you must have guessed, I made that up. But Ralph Waldo Emerson was perfectly capable of mouthing such pedestrian stuff, by the dozens. Flip through any of those self-help books and you will find a quote by this character, things like “As we grow old, the beauty steals inward” or “A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as unsupportable as any other dullness” and other such mind-blowing nonsense. I suspect that his name “Ralph Waldo Emerson” had such a nice musical ring around it that it lent a stamp of authority to the banality.

Question: When does an ordinary utterance become a ‘saying” and when does it get elevated to the exalted status of a ‘quotation”?

Answer: It doesn’t depend on what has been said. What matters is who has said it.

Take Edmund Hillary. Or was it George Mallory? One of these guys was asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest and he replied, puffing and panting, “Because it is there”. And this one-liner got reported all over the world. Also, Picasso’s when he said, “Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.” What pomposity!

Picasso, the famous artist could pull it off. Imagine that I am tapping away on my keyboard and my wife asks me, “Why do you blog?” and if I were to reply, “ I have seen what could be and asked why not I write?”, she would pack me off to the psychiatrist before I can say, “Sigmund Freud”.

And that smooth-talking Nehru. All that drivel about, “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” which gets quoted ad nauseum. Didn’t’ anybody have the elementary sense to tell him, “Old man, there can never be a midnight hour when the whole world can sleep together. There are longitudinal differences and various time zones. So, will you skip this rhetoric and move on with it?”

Don’t get me started on Gandhi. At one time it used to be fashionable for any shop in the country to display the words, “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him” and attribute this to Gandhi. Why should Gandhi have said this? What were his credentials to act as the mouthpiece of all customers? Gandhi, as far as I know, did not purchase a single thing in his life. Even his simple dhoti, he is said to have spun it himself. So, when did he get to see the customer’s perspective? Bah.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson didn’t say, “It is human nature to be carried away by the halo effect- and look for hidden wisdom where it doesn’t exist”