Quotes About Originality

Every man is born an original, but sadly, most men die copies.

There is much difference between imitating a good man and counterfeiting him.

Whatever goal, man has reached is due to his originality plus his brutality

The laziest man I ever met put popcorn in his pancakes so they would turn over by themselves.

Be creative. Men only learnt how to fly when they stopped imitating birds.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

There is a natural opposition among men to anything they have not thought of themselves.

No man was ever great by imitation.

Don't let anybody tell you different, man: The main goal in life careerwise should always be to try to get paid to simply be yourself.

The value of the creative faculty derives from the fact that faculty is the primary mark of man. To deprive man of its exercise is to reduce him to subhumanity.

Unless man can make new and original adaptations to his environment as rapidly as his science can change the environment, our culture will perish.

The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.

There are no new lies, no new heresies. Man is simply not that creative.

The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in others.

Ideas without precedent are generally looked upon with disfavor and men are shocked if their conceptions of an orderly world challenged.

It takes a Newton to forge a Newton. What man could have fabricated a Jesus? None but a Jesus.

How majestic is naturalness. I have never met a man whom I really considered a great man who was not always natural and simple. Affectation is inevitably the mark of one not sure of himself.

He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains proves that he has no brains of his own.

A man who has not enough originality to think out a new title for his book will be much less capable of giving it new contents.

Style means no shield at all. Style means no front at all. Style means ultimate naturalness. Style means one man alone with billions of men about.

Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.

This is not a Nora Roberts novel.

We can look outside of ourselves for some larger example out in the sky someplace—maybe even in our imaginations. But in the end, we will imitate each other. In the end, children will imitate their parents, and parents will imitate their parents. And nation will imitate nation. In the end, we will take our cues from each other, until one of us steps out and says, "Not that way. This way.