Quotes About Originality

Something very rare in this day and age is to see performers do something that has never been done before.

Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

My attitude with covers is, make it your own or else leave it alone.

It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.

The most amazing and effective inventions are not those which do most honour to the human genius.

The most wonderful and amazing people are those, who are true to themselves.

The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.

Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In loneliness one assumes the responsibility for oneself that one cannot fulfill. Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

T. S. Eliot, who remarked in one of his essays that immature poets imitate, mature poets steal).

Pinch, Bijker, and Hughes note that inclusion in a group, organization, or bureaucracy dampens the originality of inventors and innovators (Bijker, this volume). High inclusion brings mission orientation or commitment to incremental improvements in the evolving technological system with which the group, organization, or bureaucracy has identified. The

She was unlike most other girls of her age, in this—that she had ideas of her own, and was stiff-necked enough to set the fashions themselves at defiance, if the fashions didn't suit her views.

She was unlike most girls of her age, in this--that she had ideas of her own.

The little children of my brain may be weakly enough, and may be sadly in want of a helping hand to aid them in their first attempts at walking on the stage of this great world; but, at any rate, they are not borrowed children.

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.

Only lunatics can be completely original

One work of genius is worth a thousand commentaries.

The fundamental condition of genius is an abnormal predominance of sensibility and irritability over reproductive power.

Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.

I will not reason and compare my business is to create.

The difference between a good artist and a bad one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal, the good one really does.

The following Discourse [on art, by Sir Joshua Reynolds] is particularly Interesting to Blockheads as it endeavours to prove that There is No such thing as Inspiration & that any Man of a plain Understanding may by Thieving from Others become a Mich Angelo.

Imitation is criticism.

Happenstance intersecting with received wisdom produces something entirely new and significant.