Quotes on Originality

The world of art, I have suggested, is full of fakes. Fake originality, fake emotion and the fake expertise of the critics - these are all around us and in such abundance that we hardly know where to look for the real thing. Or perhaps there is no real thing?

U2 is an original species... there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.

A man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

All originality and no plagiarism makes for dull preaching.

To exact of every man who writes that he should say something new, would be to reduce authors to a small number; to oblige the most fertile genius to say only what is new, would be to contract his volumes to a few pages. Yet, surely, there ought to be some bounds to repetition; libraries ought no more to be heaped for ever with the same thoughts differently expressed, than with the same books differently decorated.

The authour who imitates his predecessors only by furnishing himself with thoughts and elegances out of the same general magazine of literature, can with little more propriety be reproached as a plagiary, than the architect can be censured as a mean copier of Angelo or Wren, because he digs his marble out of the same quarry, squares his stones by the same art, and unites them in columns of the same orders.

In Japan we have the phrase, "Shoshin," which means "beginner's mind." Our "original mind" includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything. It is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.

The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in others.

Many have original minds who do not think it - they are led away by custom!

Do your work, but do your thing.

Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.

Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop - then they blame the family for its failure to be a family.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

Style is originality; fashion is fascism. The two are eternally and unalterably opposed.

The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them.

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.