commonplaces

Every true poet is inevitably a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus, but only Columbus succeeded in discovering it.
(Yevgeny Zamyatin, We p. 66)

May you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them.
(G. B. Smith, in his final letter to J. R. R. Tolkien)

She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.
(Ayn Rand, We the Living p. 446)

...[I]n Fantasy [man] may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.
(J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories")

Making plans is often the occupation of an opulent and boastful mind, which thus obtains the reputation of a creative genius by demanding what it cannot itself supply, by censuring what it cannot improve, and by proposing what it does not know where to find.

(Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena, preface p. 7)