Quotes about Originality

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Original! We're all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper. We're like patterns stenciled on a wall. Can't you and I strike out for ourselves, May?

It seems so to me, said his wife, as if she were producing a new thought.

Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses.

What is originality in art? Perhaps it is easier to define what it is not and this may be done by saying that it is never a willful rejection of what has been accepted as the necessary laws of various forms of art. Thus in reasoning originality relies not in discarding the necessary laws of thought, but in using them to express new intellectual conceptions. In poetry originality consists not in discarding the necessary laws of rhythm but in finding new rhythms within the limits of those laws.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources

He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

I feel like I'm wasting time if I repeat myself.