Quotes About Originality

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be. . .and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, SEE, this is new It hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things.

Great things befall when one is brave enough to do something bold, strange, and unusual.

creativity is not a gimmick, but a lifestyle.

Boy bands should be exploded from a great height. They're just pretty people singing music written by others.

David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music.

Because man was created in the image of a creator. Man was created that he might create. It is not a waste of mans time to be creative. It is not a waste to pursue artistic or scientific pursuits in creativity, because this is what man was made to be able to do. He was made in he image of a creator, and given the capacity to create.

I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.

Jane Austen. Anyway, I'm not

Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.

Wearing a headband doesn't make you an Indian. Looking like a weed doesn't make you organic.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

Unless you are terribly, terribly careful, you run the danger-- without even knowing it is happening to you-- of slipping into the fatal error of reflecting the public taste instead of creating it. Your responsibility is to the public consciousness, not to the public view of itself.

There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.

It's always the case that history is a tale told by the victors. But the triumph of the scientific worldview has been so complete that we've lost more than the losing side's version of history. We've lost the idea that a view different from ours is even possible. Today we take for granted that originality is a word of praise. New strikes us as nearly synonymous with improved. But for nearly all of human history, a new idea was a dangerous idea.

If we each told each other our deepest, darkest secrets, we would laugh uproariously at our lack of originality.

A genius is one who shoots at something no one else can see — and hits it.

If the author had said "Let us put on appropriate galoshes," there could, of course, have been no poem.

No matter who you are, some scholar can show you the great idea you had was had by someone before you.

It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.

hackneyed phrases…. The purpose with which these phrases are introduced is for the most part that of giving a fillip to a passage that might be humdrum without them… but their true use when they come into the writer's mind is as danger signals; he should take warning that when they suggest themselves it is because what he is writing is bad stuff, or it would not need such help; let him see to the substance of his cake instead of decorating with sugarplums.

To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism, to steal ideas from many is research.

Pereant qui nostra ante nos dixerunt [May they perish who have used our words before us].

That table looks good," I say "It is original." Original what? What does it mean when they say that? This table is original. This pencil is an original pencil. This horse is an original horse. How can there be any other kind?