quotations about originality
All those things I stated about originality being smothered with the de-oxygenized air of commercialism are true ... unless the fire of originality is the undying flame of genius, unless it is the ceaseless light that nature gives to some of her favored sons and daughters and tells them to go forth into the dark places. When that light is once turned on in a human brain, all the avarice of business, all the commercialized powers of the world, all the grinding routine that deadens the faculties of ordinary people, merely makes the light of originality to shine the brighter, for darkness is the greatest background one can have against which to display light.
HENRY MCMASTERS
Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/o/includes/quoter_subj.php on line 37
"On Originality", Originality and Other Essays
To do merely the unusual, the bizarre, the different, the first-time thing, is not to accomplish the original. If it isn't worth something to yourself and to others it is not original in the true sense. So far as I see there isn't anything worthy of the modification of a clean-cut adjective that doesn't measure up to a certain standard.
HENRY MCMASTERS
"On Originality", Originality and Other Essays
Originality provokes originality.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that the time impresses upon our sensibility.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"The Painter of Modern Life"
Almost all the great original achievements have been the obvious ones--things that were pleading to be done.
ANONYMOUS
"Chasing the Goose Originality", The Linotype Bulletin, November/December 1921
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
FRANCOIS-RENE DE CHATEAUBRIAND
The Genius of Christianity or the Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion
Many people ... go through life with hardly an original thought; gravitate from one pleasure or amusement to another; gain a livelihood doing what someone else has assigned; flee boredom as best they can; marry and beget children; and then, without having made the slightest difference of any unique significance, die and decay like any animal.
RICHARD TAYLOR
Restoring Pride: The Lost Virtue of Our Age
When a schoolboy has original ideas, they are usually confined to spelling.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Originality is good, but none is absolute. Every giant stands on the shoulders of other giants and is therefore able to see more of the horizon.
NIYI OSUNDARE
"I am one of Africa's accidents", No Condition is Permanent
An original mind is rarely understood, until it has been reflected from some half-dozen congenial with it, so averse are men to admitting the true in an unusual form; whilst any novelty, however fantastic, however false, is greedily swallowed.
WASHINGTON ALLSTON
Lectures on Art and Poems
Originality is simply a fresh pair of eyes; if you want to astonish the world, tell the simple truth.
T. W. HIGGINSON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Be different. Be original. Nobody will remember a specific flower in a garden filled with thousands of the same yellow flower, but they will remember the one that managed to change its color to purple.
SUZY KASSEM
Rise Up and Salute the Sun
I am madly in love with humans. Especially the strange ones. For it is ever so beautiful to be strange. To do things differently than others. To see things in a rare light. To me, that is such gold to carry.
CHRISTOPHER POINDEXTER
Remington Typewriter Poetry
What the world calls originality is only an unaccustomed method of tickling it.
BERNARD SHAW
Shaw on Shakespeare
When you meet a man who announces himself as original, set him down unhesitatingly as a fraud or a victim of hallucination. Do not linger over him. It were as wise to dally with one who offers to make you a rainbow. There is such a thing as originality, and there are such things as rainbows. But they are not made to order. They occur.
ANONYMOUS
"Chasing the Goose Originality", The Linotype Bulletin, November/December 1921
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
attributed, The Lincoln Treasury
If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.
QUENTIN CRISP
The Naked Civil Servant
In one sense, originality is not only within the reach of each rational being, but is an indispensable element in true mental development. Thought is only thought in so far as it is original. Mere mechanical movements of the mind, mere repeating, borrowing, accepting, does not deserve the name of thinking.
A. I. J.
"Originality", The Chronicle, Volume IV
Every man is an original and solitary character. None can either understand or feel the book of his own life like himself.
LORD BURLEIGH
attributed, Day's Collacon
Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes