To Read Well

One must be an inventor to read well...There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that as the seer's hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part--only the authentic utterances of the oracle; all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's and Shakespeare's.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar.