Originality

What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not see before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea-an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plow had gone over before. To be the first--that is the idea. To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else--these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial. Lifetimes of ecstasy crowded into a single moment.
Mark Twain- The Innocents Abroad