Quotes About Imitation

Imitare l'inimitabile è un compito spaventoso

One of the magical side effects of having a culture of copying is the establishment of trends. People think this is a magical thing. How does it happen? Because it's legal [in the fashion industry] for people to copy one another.

been disturbed. This is why Rembrandt or Vermeer or Poussin or Chardin or Goya or Turner had no followers but only superficial imitators.

The Lord has adopted us to be his children on this condition that we reveal an imitation of Christ who is the mediator of our adoption. Unless we ardently and prayerfully devote ourselves to Christ's righteousness we do not only faithlessly revolt from our Creator, but we also abjure him as our Savior.

The life of the Christian can be an imitation of Christ (imitatio Christi) only because it is first a participation in Christ (participatio Christi

The idea of the painter and the sculptor is undoubtedly that perfect and excellent example of the mind, by imitation of which imagined form all things are represented which fall under human sight.

Perhaps the least cheering statement ever made on the subject of art is that life imitates it.

Just about ANY personality trait or skill can be learned: simply find it in someone you know and copy it. Then watch what happens.

Art should be life. It's an imitation of life. It should have some humanity in it.

I felt my whole life was a facsimile of a life.

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.

Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we die Copies?

The snake charmer should not touch the serpents before his child's eyes, knowing that the child will try to imitate him in all things.

Lo que hay fuera de mí, a veces creo que es una imitación mal hecha de lo que hay dentro de mí.

The original thoughts are like the rare and precious jewels, but remember there has always been a big market with a large number of buyers, sellers and suppliers of the imitation jewellery.

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off

Tragedy is an imitation of a whole and complete action of some amplitude. . . . Now a whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, "Ah, that is he." For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the coloring, or some such other cause.

Thus, then ... are the three differences which distinguish artistic imitation: the medium, the objects, and the manner.

Since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type (for moral character mainly answers to these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of moral differences), it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are.

Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies.

Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type--not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly.

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.

The instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of creatures; and through imitation he learns his earliest lessons.