Quotes on Originals

You should stop searching for phrases and chasing after words. Take the backward step and turn the light inward. Your body-mind of itself will drop off and your original face will appear. If you want to attain just this, immediately practice just this.

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.

There has never been an 'original' sin: each is quite banal.

I find that the very things that I get criticized for, which is usually being different and just doing my own thing and just being original, is the very thing that's making me successful.

Because ideas have to be original only with regard to their adaptation to the problem at hand, I am always extremely interested in how others have used used them.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges. It should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do.

I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation, and obviously that's sweeping. There are a couple of adaptations that are perhaps as good or better than the original work. But the vast majority of them are pointless.

The original writer is not he who refrains from imitating others, but he who can be imitated by none.

Ultimately there is light and love and intelligence in this universe. And we are it, we carry that within us, it’s not just something out there, it is within us and this is what we are trying to re-connect with, our original light and love and intelligence, which is who we are, so do not get so distracted by all this other stuff, you know, really remember what we are here on this planet for.

Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.

Patriotic feelings will surely swell, prompting proud proclamations of the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice shared by the Framers and reflected in a written document now yellowed with age . . . [F]or many Americans the bicentennial celebration will be little more than a blind pilgrimage to the shrine of the original document now stored in a vault in the National Archives. [Progressive]

It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.

Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice �out there� calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice �in here� calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.

That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they'd never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation.

The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction.

You've got to be original, because if you're like someone else, what do they need you for?

No human law can abolish the natural and original right of marriage, nor in any way limit the chief and principal purpose of marriage ordained by God’s authority from the beginning: “Increase and multiply.

You were born God's original. Try not to become someone's copy.