The great poet, playwright, actor, scientist, and statesman of the 18th and 18th centuries, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, when asked about the importance of originality in creative work, had this to say:
We are indeed born with faculties; but we owe our development to a thousand influences of the great world, from which we appropriate to ourselves what we can, and what is suitable to us. I owe much to the Greeks and French; I am infinitely indebted to Shakespeare, Sterne, and Goldsmith; but in saying this I do not show the sources of my culture; that would be an endless as well as an unnecessary task. What is important is to have a soul which loves truth, and receives it wherever it finds it.Besides, the world is now so old, so many eminent men have lived and thought for thousands of years, that there is little new to be discovered or expressed. Even my theory of colors is not entirely new. Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, and many other excellent men, have before me found and expressed the same thing in a detached form : my merit is, that I have found it also, that I have said it again, and that I have striven to bring the truth once more into a confused world.
The truth must be repeated over and over again, because error is repeatedly preached among us, not only by individuals, but by the masses. In periodicals and cyclopaedias, in schools and universities; everywhere, in fact, error prevails, and is quite easy in the feeling that it has a decided majority on its side.
Goethe in Conversations with Eckermann, trans. John Oxenford (Boston: Harvard University, 1901), 289-90.
[...] as often occurs, I read this quote by Goethe on Contemplator and the fog cleared again. The truth must be spoken over and over, as much as [...]