Originality Quotes

An original pebble is better than a counterfeit diamond. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. Connoissers admire the "skill" (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the "quality of painting" (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away. The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures "nice" or "splendid." Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing. ~ Wassily Kandinsky

Writing that flirts with incoherence can just as readily flounder as writing characterized by simplicity and composure. There is no reliable formula for originality, and strategies that are distinguished as innovative in their first incarnation can quickly become stale in the hands of lesser artists. ~ Joanna Scott

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent. ~ Virginia Woolf

[Six principles that make for a good story:] 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. compassion. ~ Anton Chekhov

As a host, Lincoln was "never at a loss as to the subjects that please the different classes of visitors and there is a certain quaintness and originality about all he has to say, so that one cannot help feeling interested. His 'talk' is not brilliant," Villard observed. "His phrases are not ceremoniously set, but pervaded with a humorousness and, at times, with a grotesque joviality, that will always please. I think it would be hard to find one who tells better jokes, enjoys them better and laughs oftener than Abraham Lincoln. ~ Harold Holzer

At the edge of who you are, you may find the fragments of your original beginnings. ~ Talismanist Giebra

The thing about you, her mother used to say, is that you never act out of character. You have no originality. But Nigora knew this was not true. Because she was going to act out of character, She was going (thought Nigora) to be herself. And yet: how could she? How could she? ~ Adam Thirlwell

Turning popular opinion upside down does not make an original. ~ Franz Grillparzer

Anyhow, the older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I'm far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Literature is too full of 'acknowledgments' and squabbles about originality ... ~ George Bernard Shaw

Tradition kills originality; you keep repeating the same things in tradition! Behave like the sky; always create new and different things; be original! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The whole of life is like that now. It's even impossible to think naturally because opinion has been set out for you to read back. Originality has been used up. And yet faith in one's uniqueness dies hard. ~ Tom Stoppard

Make a technical contribution; innovate, don't emulate. ~ David Packer

The ability to listen,watch and draw lessons from obvious and unlikely places breeds originality and growth ~ Biz Stone

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. ~ Mary Shelley

Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Reading Claire Cooks novel is like eating some exotic dish about which you say, Wow, this is great! Whats in it? The ingredients here are: intelligence, humor, poignancy, revelation and, perhaps best of all, true originality. Ready to Fall seems to me to be ready to soar. ~ Elizabeth Berg

Creativity starts with a little touch of insanity and culminates with the highest trust on its beauty, but throughout it maintains the hands of originality,humanity and ALMIGHTY. ~ Anuj

Why should Cornishmen learn Cornish? There is no money in it, it serves no practical purpose, and the literature is scanty and of no great originality or value. The question is a fair one, the answer is simple. Because they are Cornish. ~ Henry Jenner

When I was coming up, we weren't trying to get a hit or get paid, we were just trying to do our thing. The only thing we were really trying to do was to be recognized for our originality. ~ Bootsy Collins

Individuality and originality is was separates good and great artists! How much they can move people with what they do! If they can shake the heart with what they do, is the key! ~ Hiromi

The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Books only spoil the originality of genius. Very well for those who can't think for themselves - But when one has made up one's opinions, there is no use in reading. ~ Maria Edgeworth

It is commonly said to my little friend Legion: Read the great writers for style. But I say to him: Read the great dead masters for ideas. Devour them, Fletcherize them, digest, assimilate, make them part of your blood; let the enriched blood visit your brain. The resultant activities will be fairly your own, and the little kinks and convolutions of your brain, which are entirely different from the kinks of any other brain, will furnish you all the style you will ever get.
There are no really fresh ideas; just as there is not any fresh air. Air and ideas are refreshed and refreshing, vitalized and vitalizing; but the thoughts have been thought before and the air has been breathed before. ~ Eugene Manlove Rhodes

That one tickled. If electrocution is your way of flirting, I commend you on your originality. ~ Jeaniene Frost

Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation. ~ Gustave Flaubert

I, myself, was always recognized ... as the "slow one" in the family. It was quite true, and I knew it and accepted it. Writing and spelling were always terribly difficult for me. My letters were without originality. I was ... an extraordinarily bad speller and have remained so until this day. ~ Agatha Christie

Complexity of thought is no measure of originality. ~ Arthur Koestler

A good imitation is the most perfect originality ~ Voltaire

Originality is nothing by judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another. ~ Voltaire

It is part of the amazing originality of Christ that there is to be found in his teaching no word whatever which suggests a difference in the spiritual ideals, the spheres, or the potentialities of men and women. ~ Maude Royden

STAY AN ORIGINAL WORK OF ART

In this short lifetime,
Why not be --
True to your own voice,
Your own story,
Your own truths,
Your own style,
Beat and drum --
Instead of reflect the words,
Songs and march of another?
Why not use your soul's own
Unique language,
Instead of constantly try to toot something
Not true, suitable or intended
For your own instrument,
Painting,
Song,
Or story?

Why create an image you cannot produce?
And if you can create a brilliant mask,
How long will you really be able to hide your true soul
Behind it
Until its colors and plastic
Begin to fade and melt with
Time?

Do not speak about truth when there is no truth in you.
Do not speak about being yourself when you are trying hard to be someone else.
Do not keep crying about your pain when you you have no shame creating pain in others.
Do not step on truth, or someone else's truth, or someone who fights for truth --
And think there will be no repercussions;
For there is more danger in silence,
And for every action there will always be a reaction
Of opposite or equal measure.

Treasure integrity,
Treasure your own story and truths.
How will people remember you when you want to be an imitation?
How will people remember your voice when you want to sound like another?
Be so different that everybody will re ~ Suzy Kassem

When you're an original it may take time for people to catch on. So keep at it and don't question yourself. ~ Lorin Morgan-Richards

He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world's store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library. ~ Milan Kundera

Labeled fools to the world are geniuses to the cosmos. ~ Criss Jami

To be an artist and to be recognized by another artist who is, you know, just something you can't even put into words, someone that is so far beyond what the normal human being experience is in terms of creativity and originality. That was kind of a moment where I thought wow maybe I do have something more that makes me special. ~ Misty Copeland

Common people are often enough; that is why God made so many of them. Your job is to be
EXTRAORDINARY. ~ Shannon L. Alder

There was a big horror boom in the '80s, and I liked its originality and what you could get away with. ~ Chris Wooding

Anyone who attempts anything original in the world must expect a bit of ridicule. ~ Alberto Juantorena

The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue. ~ Ben Marcus

All thoughtful men are solitary and original in themselves. ~ James Russell Lowell

You come to Paris, you get true originality, and it's wonderful. ~ Andre Leon Talley

I believe in originality, primarily. However, it's important to know what there has been before to aim in that direction. Art history informs us. It informs our mind. I like to look at books, exhibitions, paintings, as a computer, subconsciously taking on information. ~ Philip Treacy

All my originality consists?in giving life in human fashion to beings which are impossible according to the laws of possibility. ~ Odilon Redon

The majority of business men are not capable of an original thought, simply because they cannot escape the tyranny of reason. ~ David Ogilvy

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice. ~ Amy Tan

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.
[Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999] ~ Anna Quindlen

Being right is based upon knowledge and experience and is often provable. Knowledge comes from the past, so it's safe. It is also out of date. It's the opposite of originality. Experience is built from solutions to old situations and problems. The old situations are probably different from the present ones, so that old solutions will have to be bent to fit new problems (and possibly fit badly). Also the likelihood is that, if you've got the experience, you'll probably use it. This is lazy. Experience is the opposite of being creative. If you can prove you're right you're set in concrete. You cannot move with the times or with other people. Being right is also being boring. Your mind is closed. You are not open to new ideas. You are rooted in your own rightness, which is arrogant. Arrogance is a valuable tool, but only if used very sparingly. Worst of all, being right has a tone of morality about it. To be anything else sounds weak or fallible, and people who are right would hate to be thought fallible. So: it's wrong to be right, because people who are right are rooted in the past, rigid-minded, dull and smug. There's no talking to them. ~ Paul Arden

I had not, it seems, the originality to chalk out a new road to shame and destruction, but trode the old track with stupid exactness not to deviate an inch from the beaten centre. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Originality is independence, not rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism. ~ George Henry Lewes

Whatever goal, man has reached is due to his originality plus his brutality ~ Adolf Hitler

Originality is merely an illusion. ~ M.C. Escher

The cacophony in my head is completely unmanageable, and it's out of the failure to blend all those dissonant voices smoothly that whatever individuality I might have has managed to emerge. Imitation is the condition of originality. Or, to put it another way: imitation is the shortest route to and the truest test of proficiency. To mimic a master requires skill and practice, which become the sources of your own mastery. ~ A.O. Scott

I was so much in the habit of having Albertine with me, and now I suddenly saw a new aspect of Habit. Hitherto I had regarded it chiefly as an annihilating force which suppresses the originality and even the awareness of one's perceptions; now I saw it as a dread deity, so riveted to one's being, its insignificant face so incrusted in one's heart, that if it detaches itself, if it turns away from one, this deity that one had barely distinguished inflicts on one sufferings more terrible than any other and is then as cruel as death itself. ~ Marcel Proust

No original thought still exists. People are original, each one of them. The same ideas that others had before you are waiting for you to bring them back to life in a new way. The part of who you are that is left behind within these old ideas is what makes them original all over again. ~ Ashly Lorenzana

Why will we be imposed on by antiquity? ~ Henry David Thoreau

I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of belonging to a literary club I belong to a municipal council. Instead of drinking and discussing authors and reviews, I sit on committees with capable practical greengrocers and bootmakers ... Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh. ~ George Bernard Shaw

It may be conceit, but I believe the subject will interest the public, and I am sure that the views are original. ~ Charles Darwin

I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose
accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my
fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man
shall be myself.

I know my heart, and have studied mankind; I am not made like any one I
have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not
better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature did wisely in
breaking the mould with which she formed me, can only be determined after
having read this work.

Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the
sovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have
I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and
veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no
crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous
ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory:
I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but
have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I
have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous,
generous and sublime; even as thou hast read my inmost soul: Power
eternal! assemble round thy throne an innumerable throng of my
fellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my
depravity, ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Matrices vary from fully automatized skills to those with a high degree of plasticity; but even the latter are controlled by rules of the game which function below the level of awareness. These silent codes can be regarded as condensations of learning into habit. Habits are the indispensable core of stability and ordered behaviour; they also have a tendency to become mechanized and to reduce man to the status of a conditioned automaton. The creative act, by connecting previously unrelated dimensions of experience, enables him to attain to a higher level of mental evolution. It is an act of liberation-the defeat of habit by originality. ~ Arthur Koestler

Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop - then they blame the family for its failure to be a family. ~ John Taylor Gatto

To do nothing is in everyone's power. ~ Samuel Johnson

No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.. ~ C.S. Lewis

I love romantic comedies. I like to watch them and I like to be in them. It's something that's increasingly difficult to find that spark of originality that makes if different than the ones that come before. ~ Julia Roberts

To make new rules break old ones. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Admirations are never paid in any way, try to make yourself of what you admire, and it will pay you with originality. ~ Auliq Ice

Originality, I fear, is too often only undetected and frequently unconscious plagiarism. ~ William Ralph Inge

A man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Every child is a one of a kind mini-masterpiece. No known duplicates exist. They each have distinctive fingerprints, heart rhythms, eye patterns, and blood constitution. Even identical twins can be physically alike and yet light years apart in how they are mentally wired and gifted. Our children do not just grow up different; they show up different. Though circumstances and training will greatly affect their lives, the originality that is already ingrained into each of our children reflects brilliant preplanning. Every birthmark is a trademark. Every special feature is a signature of divine design. ~ Stephen Kendrick

A pink rose among a thousand white daisies stand out; be likewise. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Charlotte Bronte borrowed liberally and sloppily from Joseph Sheridan le Fanu when penning Jane Eyre. The originality of this classic novel is tarnished as a result. ~ Andrew Barger

You have to question the originality of your life when it can be captured perfectly in the lyrics of a rock song. ~ Jonathan Tropper

Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented. ~ Eric Hoffer

What is originality? It is being one's self, and reporting accurately what we see and are. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ordinary American voter does not object to mediocrity. He likes his candidate to be sensible, vigorous, and, above all, what he calls 'magnetic,' and does not value, because he sees no need for, originality or profundity, a fine culture or a wide knowledge. ~ James Bryce

Disappointment leads to clarity, which leads to conviction and true originality. ~ Conan O'Brien

I rallied all the youth around me, all the people who liked Compa, but felt like it was dying, going away, being replaced with Zouk. So it became a movement. So, through the years, I've played my music with dedication, discipline and originality, and controversy also. ~ Michel Martelly

In fact, Lig never formally resigned his editorship - he merely left his office late one morning, and has never returned since. Though well over a century has now passed, many members of the Guide staff still retain the romantic notion that he has simply popped out for a sandwich and will yet return to put in a solid afternoon's work.
Strictly speaking, all editors since Lig Lury Jr., have therefore been designated acting editors, and Lig's desk is still preserved the way he left it, with the addition of a small sign that says LIG LURY, JR., EDITOR, MISSING, PRESUMED FED. ~ Douglas Adams

The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom; the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting. And we see the result. Those nations must once have had originality; they did not start out of the ground populous, lettered, and versed in many of the arts of life; they made themselves all this, and were then the greatest and most powerful nations in the world. What are they now? The subjects or dependants of tribes whose forefathers wandered in the forests when theirs had magnificent palaces and gorgeous temples, but over whom custom exercised only a divided rule with liberty and progress. ~ John Stuart Mill

One of our most deep-seated fears is that we might be called an "outsider." This fear has led us down the road to conformity, has put the imprint of "the organization man" on our souls, and has robbed us of originality of thought, individuality of personality, and constructive action. ~ Billy Graham

In the past few years, more and more passionate debates about the nature of SFF and YA have bubbled to the surface. Conversations about race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, romance, bias, originality, feminism and cultural appropriation are getting louder and louder and, consequently, harder to ignore. Similarly, this current tension about negative reviews is just another fissure in the same bedrock: the consequence of built-up pressure beneath. Literary authors feud with each other, and famously; yet genre authors do not, because we fear being cast as turncoats. For decades, literary writers have also worked publicly as literary reviewers; yet SFF and YA authors fear to do the same, lest it be seen as backstabbing when they dislike a book. (Small wonder, then, that so few SFF and YA titles are reviewed by mainstream journals.) Just as a culture of sexual repression leads to feelings of guilt and outbursts of sexual moralising by those most afflicted, so have we, by denying and decrying all criticism that doesn't suit our purposes, turned those selfsame critical impulses towards censorship.

Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA ~ Foz Meadows

To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea. ~ Tom Stoppard

Boredom is useful to me when I notice it and think: Oh I'm bored; there must be something else I want to be doing ... boredom acts as an initiator of originality by pushing me into new activities or new thoughts. ~ Hugh Prather

But I should caution that if you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them - if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the line - well, you're deluding yourself. For one thing, it's easier to plan derivative work - things that copy or repeat something already out there. So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal. ~ Ed Catmull

Unlike a fountain that circulates the same water in an enclosed, perpetually recycling system, a human being circulates thoughts in an unlimited reservoir of self.
Don't limit yourself to being a mere fountain when you contain an ocean. ~ Vera Nazarian

To be original one needs to learn the ideas of other painters in order to be different from them. ~ Edgar Alwin Payne

The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. And I really believe that. And what I try to teach young people, or anybody in any creative field, is that every idea should seemingly be outrageous. ~ George Lois

The Great don't innovate, they fertilize seeds planted by lackeys, they leave to others the inhaling of the flowers whose roots they've manured. A deceptive memory may be the key to their originality. ~ Ned Rorem

The artist's duty is to defend the exceptional: the imagination. ~ Marty Rubin

Fasting is an indispensable condition of a good life; but in fasting, as in abstinence in general, the question arises with what shall we begin: how to fast, - how often to eat, what to eat, what to avoid eating? And as we can do no work seriously without regarding the necessary order of sequence, so also we cannot fast without knowing where to begin, - with what to commence abstinence in food.
Fasting! And even an analysis of how to fast, and where to begin! The notion seems ridiculous to the majority of men.
I remember how an evangelical preacher who was attacking monastic asceticism and priding himself on his originality, once said to me, "My Christianity is not concerned with fasting and privations, but with beefsteaks." Christianity, or virtue in general - with beefsteaks!
During the long period of darkness and of the absence of all guidance, Pagan or Christian, so many wild, immoral ideas became infused into our life, especially into that lower region concerning the first steps toward a good life, - our relation to food, to which no one paid any attention, - that it is difficult for us even to understand the audacity and senselessness of upholding Christianity or virtue with beefsteaks.
We are not horrified by this association solely because a strange thing has befallen us. We look and see not: listen and hear not. There is no bad odor, no sound, no monstrosity, to which man cannot become accustomed, so that he ceases to remark that which would strik ~ Leo Tolstoy

Stuart Hall was an utterly unique figure. Although he arrived at the age of 19 from Jamaica and spent the rest of his life here, he never felt at home in Britain. This juxtaposition was a crucial source of his strength and originality. Because of his colour and origin, he saw the country differently - not as a native, but as an outsider. ~ Martin Jacques

Nothing is new except arrangement. ~ Will Durant

One of the characters in our story, Gavril Ardalionovitch Ivolgin, belonged to the other category; he belonged to the category of "much cleverer" people; though head to toe he was infected with the desire to be original. But this class of person, as we have observed above, is far less happy than the first. The difficulty is that the intelligent "ordinary" man, even if he does imagine himself at times (and perhaps all his life) a person of genius and originality, nevertheless retains within his heart a little worm of doubt, which sometimes leads the intelligent man in the end to absolute despair. If he does yield in this belief, he is still completely poisoned with inward-driven vanity. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It was a wartime story, goodies versus baddies, lots of explosions and shooting. The Germans always shouted 'Aiiieeee!' as they died. Atkins wondered what he would choose, confronted with similar circumstances. 'Aiiieeee!' seemed to him to lack the necessary gravitas and originality, as well as sounding a bit, well, German. But then who knew what might come to mind, in those final moments? ~ Alastair Reynolds

What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea parties. What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live. ~ Annie Dillard

Pampered content is a public resignation of artistic integrity. ~ Kevin Focke

You're an unemployed bum. Should you live in that Finnish city by the lake with the S-market and K-market? Or how about that other Finnish city by the lake with the S-market and K-market? Finnish cities are all so very different! ~ Phil Schwarzmann

There are only 1% people in the world,who follows their own dreams and 99% people are those who follows dreams of others,it is called the lack of originality"

Mohsen Ali ~ Mohsen Ali

Self-projection is, more often than not, the move of the minor craftsman, of the tactics of the hour whose inherent weakness is, precisely, that of originality. ~ George Steiner