Quotes About Originality

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion. —JACK KEROUAC

When I talked with David Swensen, Yale's chief investment officer, he told me that "unconventional wisdom is the only way you can succeed." Follow the herd, and you don't have a chance.

Il n'y a point de génie sans un grain de folie.

She was Anna Madrigal, a self-made woman, and there was no one else in the world exactly like her.

Inspiration is everywhere so don't get trapped in reading and watching too much. Get out. Talk to people, friends, family, loved ones. Draw inspiration from everyday life. It has inexhaustible references and is always original.

It's important for an artist to realize his own style. Copying or letting yourself be influenced by another's work is good for a start, just don't let yourself get stuck with it. Try to evolve and develop your own. Broadening your knowledge in other mediums is important in acquiring inspiration.

What is the point of being on this Earth if you are going to be like everyone else?

if it really was brilliant I'd have thought of it already.

But there was no substitute for reality; one should beware of imitations.

Dear Mr Jinx: I'm afraid your idea is not at all original. Stories about writers whose work is always plagiarised even before they can complete it go back at least to H. G. Wells's 'The Anticipator'. About once a week I receive a manuscript beginning:

Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.

Read it up – you really should. There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.

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.

There is nothing new under the sun. It has been done before.

When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry.

say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry.

Morgan had been, for a very long time, the most remarkable object in her own landscape, and anything stranger than herself was, to her mind, either an obvious sham, or non-existent.

I do not in general have the impression that sexual abstinence helps produce energetic, independent men of action or original thinkers, bold liberators and reformers. Far more often it produces well-behaved weaklings who later merge into the great mass of those who habitually, if reluctantly, follow the lead given by strong individuals.

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.

Ready-made phrases and the ritual of etiquette were unknown to him; his thoughtfulness was pure improvisation, and it resembled the little inventions affection inspires.

Das Glück besteht darin, zu leben wie alle Welt und doch wie kein anderer zu sein.

He made of his sexuality an ethic; he expressed this ethic in works of literature. It is by this deliberate act that Sade attains a real originality.

WHAT WE TEACH YOU How to address your lodge. How to give toasts. How to tell dialect stories. How to propose to a lady. How to entertain banquets. How to make convincing selling-talks. How to build big vocabulary. How to create a strong personality. How to become a rational, powerful and original thinker. How to be a MASTER MAN!

He was not a Babbitt, not a Rotarian, not an Elk, not a deacon.