There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the
mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read
becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly
significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We
then see, what is always true, that, as the seer’s hour of vision is
short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance,
the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or
Shakspeare, only that least part, — only the authentic utterances of
the oracle; — all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times
Plato’s and Shakspeare’s.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The American Scholar
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The American Scholar
