Quotes About Imitation

All art is an imitation of nature.

Fourth-century preacher John Chrysostom said, "This is the rule of most perfect Christianity, its most exact definition, its highest point, namely, the seeking of the common good. For nothing can so make a person an imitator of Christ as caring for his neighbors.

He did a very good impression of a stone column.

Sometimes we become what we see. Sometimes we take what we see and make it the model for what we refuse to become.

While he was alive, he was impossible to ignore; once he had gone, he was impossible to imitate.

By the time we got to Ferrington, I was laughing at Will's stories about Rockpoint High. It seemed the kids gave the teachers a hard time; they were always cutting up and saying funny things. Will was good at imitating their Down-East accents, but I had a feeling Susan was right about his not having any friends. It was as though Will spent most of his school day watching and listening.

Students love trying to imitate Nabokov, which teaches them a lot—mostly about why not to imitate somebody wired so differently from yourself. Nabokov wannabes don't sound just like turds, but like pretentious turds. The writer's best voice will grow from embracing her own "you-ness"—which I call talent, and which is best expressed in voice. Which

It is fine to imitate a being you respect, but you cannot become that very being. Imitation is something one does to grow and develop. It is not something you use to deceive yourself. You absorb in yourself the things you think have some kind of value, but even if you try to find the meaning about your true self you will not find anything. Because those who cannot accept their real self always fail.

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term 'meme' for a unit of cultural imitation.

It is genes that allow the human mind to learn, to remember, to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts. Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just the carriers of heredity. They are active during life;

I have to speak carefully now because I have this strange habit of imitating British people without even realizing that I'm doing it.

But since the work of man's mind is not automatic, his values, like all his premises, are product either of his thinking or of his evasions: man chooses his values by a conscious process of thought–or accepts them by default, by subconscious associations, on faith, on someone's authority, by some form of social osmosis or blind imitation. Emotions are produced by man's premises, held consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly.

because here I was having a life, even though it was a pastiche of elements of the life of someone else.

The very concept of imitation is suspect to begin with (if children are general imitators, why don't they imitate their parents' habit of sitting quietly in airplanes?)

I love it. When they stop imitating me then I'll start wondering where I'm going wrong. Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new.

I could tell you which writer's rhythms I am imitating. It's not exactly plagiarism, it's falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it.

Every age has its peculiar folly: Some scheme, project, or fantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the force of imitation.

Still more beautiful were the intrigues of young Michelangelo. One day while still apprenticed to the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, he was lent an old master drawing of a head to copy. He rendered it so precisely that, in the words of his first biographer, Ascanio Condivi, "when he returned the copy to the owner in place of the original, at first the owner did not detect the deception, but discovered it only when the boy was telling a friend of his and laughing about it.

Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion—and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings

Drama—formalized imitation, enacted upon a stage—is precisely behavior portraying behavior, but distilled ever closer to the essence. Literature takes that transmission one more difficult step, portraying action in the imagination of the writer and the reader, in the complete absence of both real actors and a material stage.

The imitation and communication of the greatest, most memorable acts necessitates distillation and communication of the patterns of the deepest wisdom of mankind.

Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion—and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings. Explicit philosophical statements regarding the grounds for and nature of ethical behavior, stated in a verbally comprehensible manner, were not established through rational endeavor.

People exchange information about how to act in many ways. They observe each other and imitate what they see. When they imitate, they use their bodies to represent the bodies of others. But this imitation is not mindless, automatized mimicry. It is instead the ability to identify regularities or patterns in the behavior of other people, and then to imitate those patterns.

It is easier and more direct to represent a behavioral pattern with behavior than with words. Outright mimicry does that directly, action for action. Imitation, which can produce new behaviors akin to those that motivated the mimicry, takes that one step further.