If we pay no attention to words whatever, we may become like the isolated gentleman who invent a new perpetual motion machine on old lines in ignorance of all previous plans, and then is surprised that it doesn't work. If we confine our attention entirely to the slang of the day--that is to say, if we devote ourselves exclusively to modern literature--we get to think the world is progressing when it is only repeating itself.... [I]t is only when one reads what men wrote long ago that one realizes how absolutely modern the best of the old things are.

Rudyard Kipling, "The Uses of Reading"