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“With the first word I used intelligently, I learned to live, to think, to hope.”
Language is remembered as opening several capacities at once—thought, hope and a fuller experience of living—rather than merely adding a vocabulary item.
Source note: Optimism: An Essay (1903), Project Gutenberg #31622. Keller is reflecting on her own early experience of language and education.
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“whatever school you follow, it must be only to learn method, not to imitate result”
Studying earlier schools should teach method without turning the student into an imitator, preserving space for an artistic response rooted in the maker’s own time and nature.
Source note: Lectures on Art, Lecture VII, Project Gutenberg #19164. The surrounding passage explicitly distinguishes learning from past masters from adopting their results as one’s own.
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“I celebrate myself, and sing myself.”
The opening celebrates the self without separating it from the wider world that the poem later embraces.
Source note: Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself.”
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“The wise man is self-sufficient. Nevertheless, he desires friends.”
Self-sufficiency does not require isolation; inner stability can coexist with a genuine desire for friendship and shared life.
Source note: Letter 9 contrasts Stoic self-sufficiency with the continuing value of friendship.
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“They ought to be illustrations not authorities, studies not models.”
Great predecessors can teach principles without becoming templates to copy, preserving the learner’s responsibility to develop independent judgment and expression.
Source note: The Principles of Success in Literature, chapter on Style, Project Gutenberg #10420; Lewes is warning writers against imitating Cicero, Titian or other masters.
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“I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness.”
Whitman describes self-discovery as expansion rather than invention: experience reveals capacities and goodness that were already present but insufficiently recognized.
Source note: Song of the Open Road, section 5, after the speaker describes loosening imagined limits.