Quotes About Originality

I cherish two sentences and keep them close to my desk. The first is by Flaubert. I came upon it among Van Gough's letters. It says, simply, 'Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation.

Invention hovers always a little above the rules.

Does the hummingbird think he himself invented his crimson throat? He is wiser than that, I think.

There is a notion that creative people are absentminded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true. For they are in another world altogether.

Footnote: In 1998, a woman in Saline, Michigan received a patent for a Decorative Penile Wrap...The patent included three pages of drawings, including a penis wearing a ghost outfit, another in the robes of the Grim Reaper, and one dressed up to look like a snowman.

Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a culture of conformity, that's braver than it sounds.

Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a

Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you.

Inventar, deve-se admitir humildemente, não consiste em criar algo do nada, mas sim do caos.

In what desert land have you lived, where no one was kind enough to inform you that these fancies which you have so greedily imbibed are a thousand years old and as musty as they are ancient?

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos;

have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations.

Imitating others, I failed to find myself. I looked inside and discovered I only knew my name. When I stepped outside I found my real Self. ~Rumi

If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don't give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.

There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all. It is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry to put down dissent and originality,' said H.L. Mencken.

Uma das coisas mais fascinantes da raça humana é não haver duas pessoas iguais. (...) No comportamento, tal como na aparência, cada ser humano é único.

To her, majoring in painting was an act of insanity akin to majoring in photocopying or reheating leftovers

Dagny, he said, looking at the city as it moved past their taxi window, think of the first man who thought of making a steel girder. He knew what he saw, what he thought and what he wanted. He did not say, 'It seems to me,' and he did not take orders from those who say, 'In my opinion.

And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.

people who listen and don't give a damn, but sit there in order to tell their friends that they have attended a lecture by a famous name. All second-handers.

Every man creates his meaning and form and goal. Why is it so important--what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right--so long as it's not yourself?

She's like nothing you bastards ever dreamed of!

Roark walked now to these drawings; they were the first things to be packed.