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… - Ralph Waldo Emerson

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly coextensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.