Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson. "An Address." Collected in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.