What are original series?

Famous quotes containing the words original and/or series:

    “The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.”
    —E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)