Quotes About Originality

I survive mainly by pleasing others. You do that to get out. To get out you figure out what they want you to say and then you say it with as much skill and originality as possible and then, if they're convinced, you get out.

Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything—from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade.

She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.

Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else's.

but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination—"unstuckness," in other words—are completely outside its domain.   We

The ideas, the things I was saying about science and ghosts, and even that idea this afternoon about caring and technology—they are not my own. I haven't really had a new idea in years.

there are no cookie cutters in heaven.

Complex and original people know that truth is rarely simple, almost never all of this or all of that, but elusive minglings and mixtures, evolving shapes, with tinctures of irony and paradox.

Perfection is insignificant. Is boring.

Ideas do not have to be correct in order to be good; its only necessary that, if they do fail, they do so in an interesting way.

All too often, instead of trusting their inner wisdom, that genius inside, most people follow the crowd.

If you do what the masses do, you get the following picture:

you want to be rich, you need to think independently rather than go along with the crowd.

Imagination is what you need.

Don't let them make anything of you but yourself, that's all.

I don't want her to be like other people. There are too many other people around as it is.

The trouble with him seems to be that he hasn't enough imagination.

Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull no one would read them.

She isn't like any of the girls I ever knew, or any of the girls I was myself.

If you please, Great-Aunt Nancy, said Emily deliberately, I don't like to be told I look like other people. I look just like myself.

Well, I don't want to be any one but myself, even if I go uncomforted by diamonds all my life.

I couldn't remember one word when I woke up this morning. And I'm afraid I'll never be able to think out another one as good. Somehow, things never are so good when they're thought out a second time. Have you ever noticed that?

I think a truly perfect person would be very uninteresting.