Preface
“Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. …But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must, … we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak.
… One must be an inventor to read well. … 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 Shakespeare, 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 Shakespeare’s.”
from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar” oration given on August 31, 1837