
Did Adam have a Bellybutton?: And other tough questions about the Bible (2000)
Book of Taliesin (c. 1275?), The First Address of Taliesin
Did Adam have a Bellybutton?: And other tough questions about the Bible (2000)
1810s
Source: Selected Writings
Context: It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Letter to Isaac McPherson http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html (13 August 1813) ME 13:333.
The sentence He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. is sometimes paraphrased as "Knowledge is like a candle. Even as it lights a new candle, the strength of the original flame is not diminished."
When she met Sri Aurobindo for the first time with her husband Richards at rue Fransçois Martin at Pondicherry, quoted in "Diary notes and Meeting with Sri Aurobindo", and also in Biblio, Volume 3 Asia-Pacific Communication Associates, (1998) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=tC9VAAAAYAAJ, p. 33
Lives of the Ten Orators
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)