A bit of Emerson.....................

     Insist on yourself;  never imitate.  Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous possession.  That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. . . . Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.  Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.
     Society never advances.  It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other.  It undergoes continual changes;  it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration.  For everything that is given something is taken.  Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, as culled from his Essay On Self-Reliance