"A Letter to a Young Poet"
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)
Original text: On voit que l'histoire est une galerie de tableaux où il y a peu d'originaux et beaucoup de copies.
Variant translation: History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
Old Regime (1856), p. 88 http://books.google.com/books?id=N50aibeL8BAC&pg=PA88&vq=%22history,+it+is+easily+perceived%22&source=gbs_search_r&cad=1_1
1850s and later
“I think [Pat] Buchanan is far too easily and glibly dismissed.”
Hardball with Chris Matthews, 11 February 2005
Introduction
Misquoting Jesus (2005)
Context: It is one thing to say that the originals were inspired, but the reality is that we don't have the originals—so saying they were inspired doesn't help me much, unless I can reconstruct the originals. Moreover, the vast majority of Christians for the entire history of the church have not had access to the originals, making their inspiration something of a moot point. Not only do we not have the originals, we don't have the first copies of the originals. We don't even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later. In most instances, they are copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places. As we will see later in this book, these copies differ from one another in so many places that we don't even know how many differences there are. Possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.
“An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.”
Le Coq et l’Arlequin (1918)
Mrs. Alving, Act II
Ghosts (1881)
Context: I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 185.
“…there is in this world no line so bad that someone won’t someday copy it.”
“The Profession of Poetry”, p. 165
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, The use of the lens in pictorial work, p. 57
