Quotes About Originality

If I try to be like him, who will be like me?

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.

The great man is the man who does a thing for the first time.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time. It is just that others are behind the time.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.

What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it. What another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself- and thus make yourself indispensable.

You were placed on this earth to create, not to compete.

Creativeness often consists of merely turning up what is already there.

And the thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

There is only one answer to destruc-tiveness and that is creativity.

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

We define genius as the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.

Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.

I have an almost complete disregard of precedent and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things always have been done. ... I defy the tyranny of precedent. I cannot afford the luxury of a closed mind. I go for anything new that might improve the past.

If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions.

There's a pinch of the madman in every great man.

No man ever yet became great by imitation.

Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvelously intricate in thought and action.

Whosoever would be a man must be a non-conformist.

Great ideas are not charitable.

Every time a man puts a new idea across he finds ten men who thought of it before he did - but they only thought of it.

Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.