originality

7 entries · All themes

• Apr 11 What the Notebooks Knew Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, section 155 (trans. Helen Zimmern) Belief in Inspiration. — Artists have an interest in others' believing in sudden suggestions, so-cal...
• Mar 27 The Poorest of All Imitations Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, Discourse VI The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one...
• Mar 12 What Creation Does to the Past Jorge Luis Borges, Kafka and His Precursors (Other Inquisitions, trans. James E. Irby) If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistake...
• Feb 24 Pure Makeshift Wisława Szymborska, The Poet and the World (Nobel Lecture) This is why I value that little phrase "I don't know" so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty ...
• Feb 9 Your Plot of Ground Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; t...
• Jan 24 What the Bees Know Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 'Of the Education of Children' (trans. John Florio) Even as bees pillage here and there from flowers, but afterward make honey, which is all theirs; it ...
• Jan 18 The Labour of Tradition T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate...