Quotes About Originality

It is characteristic of the unlearned that they are forever proposing something which is old, and because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to be new.

Discoveries that are anticipated are seldom the most valuable. ... It's the scientist free to pilot his vessel across hidden shoals into open seas who gives the best value.

It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.

My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

People who do not eat butterflies will wear their clothes the wrong way, and people who wear their clothes the wrong way are inviting lemmings inside." -- Muzhduk the Ugli the Third

Practice makes perfect, but it doesn't make new

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.

Research is to see what everybody has seen and to think what nobody else has thought.

Perfect is overrated. Perfect is boring." I smile. "You don't think I'm perfect?" "No. You're delightfully screwy, and I wouldn't have you any other way.

It is always in the creating your path, not in the fitting in the society.

Be stupid, be dumb, be funny, if that's who you are. Don't try to be someone that society wants you to be, that's stupid. So be yourself.

If You Want To Rebel Against Society, Don't Dull The Blade

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas.

So if we have anything original to offer, it's to speak from our own life about the society we're in.

It is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termite-like.

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.

You'd look beautiful in a feedbag dress tied in the middle with a rope.

There is something very wrong with a people who consider that the greatest that would ever be has already been, and that the best they can do is to duplicate the past.

What India expected of its artists was craft skill, not creativity; conformity to tradition, not originality

Creative thinking is not stimulated by vicarious issues but by personal problems.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path... It sees no distinction in adding story to story... It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it...

Towering genius distains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

As our case is new, we must think and act anew.

Commentary by J.-P. Quélin, food critic for Le Monde). [New York and London chefs] are cooking, he says, at a level of originality that defies judgment, defies criticism, defies the grammar of cuisine. (This I think is true. When I took my brother to L'Arpege for his birthday we got fourteen -small- courses ... that made even the best of the old cuisine look like sludge.)