Did Emerson really say “Go where there is no path and leave a trail”?

The version you’ve probably seen

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Usually credited to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but it isn’t his: none of fourteen of his books on Project Gutenberg contains it. Muriel Strode published her own line, above, in 1903; the popular version turns her “I will” into an order.

In plain words

Strode writes in the first person, so it’s a vow rather than advice: she won’t simply follow the road that’s already there, she’ll go somewhere unmapped and leave a track behind her. A trail is something other people can follow later. For a restless mind it reads less like a call to rebel and more like permission to stop waiting for the path to appear.

Sit with this line → A few quiet exchanges about what it stirs in you.

Worth knowing

The line opens a run of short sayings Strode published in The Open Court, a Chicago magazine. Another from the same page: “Say not that this or that thing came to thwart you; it only came to test you.” Quote Investigator also traces the line to Strode.