In my book Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), ch. 5, p. 73, n.23, I provide a quote, “What you do speaks so loud I can’t hear what you are saying.” which I took from an article by Clarence Carson. Carson calls it an “old saw” but provides no attribution.
I have realized this is a version of a quote widely attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. According many sources on the Internet, the original quote is “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” Emmet Fox, in The Sermon on the Mount: The Key to Success in Life (HarperOne, Reissue ed., 2009), provides a subtly different version, also attributed to Emerson: “What you are shouts so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”
I found it curious that none of the sources attributing this to Emerson provide a citation. I was unable to find this exact quote anywhere in Emerson’s work. With the help of people on Twitter, I finally came across this: “What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary,” from this paragraph:
Let nature bear the expense. The attitude, the tone, is all. Let our eyes not look away, but meet. Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady of my acquaintance said, “I don’t care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Social Aims,” in The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 8 (Letters and Social Aims) (Liberty Fund, from The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 12 vols. Fireside Edition, Boston and New York, 1909), pp. 94–95.
My guess is that the original, somewhat unwieldy sentence from Emerson was paraphrased to the more elegant version widely quoted today, but without anyone mentioning that it was a paraphrase, which also explains why no one repeating the quote gives a source.
Alert Snopes!
