Quotes About Originality

FIRST EDITION

Sometimes I think we're all trying to be shadows of each other, trying to buy the same records and everything even if we don't like them. Kids are like robots, off an assembly line, and I don't want to be a robot!

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

La originalidad de Borges (entre otras, entre las muchas formas de su originalidad) reside en su resistencia a ser encontrado allí donde lo buscamos: algo del viejo vanguardista queda en esa resistencia a responder lo que se le pregunta y ajustarse a lo que se quiere escuchar de él.

Beethoven speaking to royalty: "What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

You can be nobody but yourself. You cannot hide away, nor be lost in any crowd. You carry the glory and the burden of your individuality.

I think trying to be cool is the worst possible ambition - and I have never suffered from it.

I try not to jump to conclusions about anything I feel I've seen or heard before. I try not to write off music my kids play me as "throwback" even if it closely resembles something that I thought was new when I was a kid. Sure, I want to put on the seventies' English band the Jam and say, See! Your new little punk bands are just shiny versions of this! But I'd be wrong. To diminish the new as nothing more than a rehash is a mistake.

The Double Cross idea had always been based on lateral thinking without boundaries, a willingness to contemplate plans that others would dismiss as unworkable or, frankly, barmy.

Something struck us as wrong, which only meant that we had not thought of it ourselves.

Don't read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.

must be prepared to think outside the box,

If you try to chase it, if you try to follow trends and anticipate what the next thing is going to be, you will fail. You just have to leave it, you have to go with what it is. You have to be true, you have to be honest.

Un pensatore che non soffra il suo problema e non viva il suo pensiero, non è un pensatore ma un retore, ripetitore di formole che furono pensieri già pensati in passato da altri.

Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation

If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.

I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character… like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy…The turkey… is a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America.

Write to Please Yourself. When You write to Please Others You end up Pleasing No one.

Originality is the art of concealing your sources.

If we all think alike, no one is thinking.

persuaded, therefore, that ere long some ingenious

it is as truly folly for the poor to ape the rich, as for the frog to swell in order to equal the ox.

As we have likely recognized by now, no two snowflakes, trees, or animals are alike. No two people are the same, either. Everything has its own Inner Nature.