Quotes About Originality

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own, quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in a world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority

When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.

Man hopes, genius creates

A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good.

My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know...

Congratulate yourself if you have broken the monotony of a conventional age

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.

Ser você mesmo em um mundo que está constantemente tentando fazer de você outra coisa é a maior realização.

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and make a trail.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say I think, I am, but quotes some saint or safe.

I hate quotes: tell me what you know.

Nu merge pe drumul b?t?torit. În schimb, mergi pe acolo pe unde nu s-a mai c?lcat È™i las? o urm?.

Y se expresaron con sus propias palabras, no con las palabras de los demás hombres

To live another's dharma, to try to be a Buddha or to be a Christ because Christ did it, doesn't get us there; it just makes us mimickers

Create art. Not just an art, but thermo fucking nuclear art.

Style, on the other hand, is the art of bringing your defining individual features to the fore, regardless of what others might expect or find acceptable:

Creativity is a continual surprise.

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-fly-apart-disintegrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?

if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is-- excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.

Self-conciousness is the enemy of all creativity.