Quotes About Originality

Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me. Just say what you want to say, then, and say it with all your heart. Share whatever you are driven to share. If it's authentic enough, believe me—it will feel original.

The Bhagavad Gita--the ancient Indian yogic text--says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection. So I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.

Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.

Siempre pensaba que mis preguntas eran preguntas equivocadas porque nadie más las preguntaba. Tal vez no se les ocurrieron a nadie. Tal vez la oscuridad llegó allí primero. Tal vez yo soy la primera luz que toca un golfo de ignorancia. Tal vez mis preguntas importan.

In the beginning of human creativity, everything good was God-given, there was no patent on manna from heaven, no copyright on the blueprints of the Mishkan, and people entertained themselves by dancing with a statue of a golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai. The Bible is of course all in the public domain; the Lord gave His words to Moses, gratis.

I can knit. I knit all year, day in, day out. It is my passion, and I rarely knit the same thing twice the same way.

No two people knit alike, look alike, think alike; why should their projects be alike? Your sweater should be like your own favorite original recipes - like nobody else's on earth. And a good thing too.

You have intellect, and courage, and command. Play your own game, and don't worry about what anyone else is doing. That is what's going to give you a shot at making it. Comparing yourself to anyone else will just drive you crazy.

What's your name?" I ask. I'm expecting something different from what we usually get down here in Soho, newbie runaways styling themselves Shadesong or Spartacus or whatever. But

These are bagpipes. I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equaled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.

If I won't be myself, who will?

It is conventional to call 'monster' any blending of dissonant elements. I call 'monster' every original inexhaustible beauty.

Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

Every really new idea looks crazy at first.

There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.

The trouble with most photographers, and for that matter also with painters, and other people, is, that they are always trying to do something which is outside of themselves. In consequence they produce nothing that means anything to those who have the gift or intuition for truth: all else is really not worth a tinker's damn.

Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club?... Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam.

Invention has ever imagination and poetry at its heart.

Era este hombre muy estirado y relamido, y la gente estirada y relamida suele vivir habitualmente en un mundo tan reducido que cualquier cosa violenta e inusitada les puede sacar brusca y completamente de él; por ello, esta clase de gente suele desconfiar instintivamente de todo lo que represente una cierta originalidad.

Not easily may an individual escape the deep slavery of the herd.