ORIGINALITY QUOTES
quotations about originality
Experience shows how incredibly difficult it is to get men really to encourage the principle of originality. They will admit it in theory, but in practice the old error--the error which arrested a hundred civilizations--returns again. Men are too fond of their own life, too credulous of the completeness of their own ideas, too angry at the pain of new thoughts, to be able to bear easily with a changing existence; or else, having new ideas, they want to enforce them on mankind--to make them heard, and admitted, and obeyed before, in simple competition with other ideas, they would ever be so naturally. One most important pre-requisite of a prevailing nation is that it should have passed out of the first stage of civilization into the second stage--out of the stage where permanence is most wanted into that where variability is most wanted; and you cannot comprehend why progress is so slow till you see how hard the most obstinate tendencies of human nature make that step to mankind.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
DOROTHY L. SAYERS
Gaudy Night
Originality is rare: most of us know a good thing as soon as the other fellow sees it.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
The really original man goes next door the way everybody else does. All that he looks for is the best way, not a queer way. He has no time to waste in attempts to be "different." In a world consisting of ninety percent of people struggling to be unconventional, he is original enough to be perfectly conventional if it happens best to suit his purpose. He is not a rebel, because he is not a slave. Originality is freedom, not rebellion.
ANONYMOUS
"Chasing the Goose Originality", The Linotype Bulletin, November/December 1921
Since Eden's freshness and man's fall, no rose has been original.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Originality"
Originality! What do they mean by it? The action of the world upon us commences with the hour of our birth, and ends only with our death; it is here, and there, and everywhere. There is nothing we can claim as our own but energy, strength, and volition; very little of me would be left, if I could but say what I owe to my great predecessors and contemporaries.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Originality is not about what the work says--whether novel or otherwise--but about how the work says it. It pertains not to content but to form, not to idea but to expression.
ABRAHAM DRASSINOWER
What's Wrong with Copying?
I would rather be the author of one original thought than conqueror of a hundred battles.
WILLIAM BENTON CLULOW
Aphorisms and Reflections
The very best kind of originality is that which comes after a sound apprenticeship: it is that which shall prove to be the blending of a firm conception of all useful precedent and the progressive tendencies of an able mind.
ANONYMOUS
Monotype, May/June 1917
Not like Homer would I write,
Not like Dante if I might,
Not like Shakespeare at his best,
Not like Goethe or the rest,
Like myself, however small,
Like myself, or not at all.
WILLIAM ALLINGHAM
"Blackberries"
That which is original creates a new origin. That which is original, by definition, must stray off the previously worn paths. It must wander; it must err.
BLAKE CHARLTON
Spellwright
An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
STEPHEN FRY
The Liar
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.
JIM JARMUSCH
MovieMaker Magazine, January 22, 2004
Originality is the best form of rebellion.
MIKE SASSO
Being Human
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
JEAN COCTEAU
Le Rappel a l'Ordre
I'll develop my own image. I'm an original man. A one and only. I just need some help.
SAM SHEPARD
The Tooth of Crime
Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of, and the first service which originality has to render them, is that of opening their eyes; which being once fully done, they would have a chance of being themselves original.
JOHN STUART MILL
On Liberty
To be new or original, after all, is proof that we are alive and have agency, that we are not enmeshed in an inexorable chain of cause and effect.
JEREMY BEGBIE
Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts
We are more in want of originality the less we are conscious of the want.
J. W. DAVIDSON
attributed, Day's Collacon
More than a rejection or dissolution of the past, avant-garde originality is conceived as a literal origin, a beginning from ground zero, a birth.
ROSALIND E. KRAUSS
The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths