")
"Fame does not depend on the will of any man; but reputation may be
given and taken away; for fame is the sympathy of kindred intellects,
and sympathy is not a subject of _willing_; while reputation,
having its source in the popular voice, is a sentence which may be
altered or suppressed at pleasure. Reputation, being essentially
contemporaneous, is always at the mercy of the envious and ignorant.
But Fame, whose very birth is posthumous, and which is only known to
exist by the echoes of its footsteps through congenial minds, can
neither be increased nor diminished by any degree of wilfulness."
"An original mind is rarely understood until it has been
_reflected_ from some half-dozen congenial with it; so averse are
men to admitting the true in an unusual form; while any novelty,
however fantastic, however false, is greedily swallowed. Nor is this
to be wondered at, for all truth demands a response, and few people
care to _think_, yet they must have something to supply the place
of thought. Every mind would appear original if every man had the
power of projecting his own into the minds of others."
"All effort at originality must end either in the quaint or monstrous;
for no man knows himself as on original; he can only believe it on the
report of others to whom he is made known, as he is by the projecting
power before spoken of.
Pages:
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342