Daily Inspiration Quote by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Ebner-Eschenbach flips the usual moral script on plagiarism with a hunter's grin. Instead of treating theft as a stain on literature, she frames it as a backhanded compliment: if someone is stealing from you, you must have written something worth taking. The poacher metaphor does the heavy lifting. It yokes artistry to scarcity and desire, suggesting that ideas, like game, attract pursuit only when they have life in them. No prey, no pursuit; no value, no theft.

The intent is less permissive than it first appears. She's not excusing copying so much as refusing the posture of wounded ownership. For a 19th-century novelist writing in a culture obsessed with authorship, originality, and the emerging machinery of copyright, the line needles the anxious bourgeois belief that a work is a fenced estate. Ebner-Eschenbach implies the opposite: literature is an ecosystem, not a private park. Influence, imitation, even outright pilfering are symptoms of circulation - proof that a text is in the bloodstream of a reading public.

There's also a quiet jab at vanity. Complaining about poachers assumes you were entitled to exclusive possession of the forest. Rejoicing re-centers the author as the source of nourishment rather than the owner of scarcity. The irony is sharp: the very act that threatens your uniqueness also confirms it. In her worldview, being stolen from isn't just an insult; it's a kind of crude canonization.