Literature is an investment of genius which pays dividends to all subsequent times.
Interpretation
Literature enriches future generations by preserving profound ideas and creativity.
This quote by John Burroughs conveys the idea that great literary works are a powerful investment of intellectual and creative effort. Such works continue to benefit future generations, imparting wisdom, inspiration, and insight, thereby allowing society to learn from the past and cultivate new ideas.
In practice
During a literary festival, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of literature in shaping society.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.
Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.
Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
There's a thriving field of self-published stuff in, particularly, black fiction. I don't know that other groups of people of color have that same recourse.
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
An unread author is an author who is a victim of the worst kind of censorship, indifference - a censorship more effective than the Ecclesiastical Index.
It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .
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