Van Gogh painted his most famous canvas from memory, in an asylum studio, and considered it a failure because it wasn’t based on direct observation. The line worth keeping: he sold exactly one painting in his lifetime, from a body of work now worth billions.

Nearly three hundred of France’s most respected artists signed a letter in 1887 demanding the tower’s construction stop entirely. The line worth keeping: within a generation, the loudest of its critics ate lunch there on a regular basis just to avoid looking at it from outside.

Kafka asked his closest friend to burn every manuscript he left behind, certain none of it was worth saving. The line worth keeping: Max Brod refused, and Kafka’s own name eventually became the word for an entire kind of nightmare.

Kant delayed publishing his most important idea for roughly a decade, uncertain the world was ready for it, and built his entire life around a routine so rigid neighbors used it to check the time. The line worth keeping: he never traveled fifty miles from home, and reshaped how the rest of the world thinks about knowledge and duty anyway.

In 1946, the critics W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argued that a creator’s own stated intentions, or their own private verdict on their work, shouldn’t be treated as the final word on what that work actually means or is worth. This week is a study in exactly that gap. Van Gogh called his sky a failure. Kafka wanted his own novels destroyed. Neither judgment held up for very long once the work left their hands.