Men often applaud an imitation and hiss the real thing.
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
No one can be profoundly original who does not avoid eccentricity.
Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.
Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else –and failing.
Originality is nothing but judicious plagiarism.
Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
Originality is the one thing unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.
ORIGINALITY is unexplored territory. You get there by carrying a canoe — you can't take a taxi.
People would rather be wrong than be different.
Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented.
Set me a task in which I can put something of my very self, and it is a task no longer. It is joy and art.
The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.
The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.
The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
The more intelligent one is, the more men of originality one finds. Ordinary people find no difference between men.
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
The most original of authors are not so because they advance what is new, but more because they know how to say something, as if it had never been said before.
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
The true is inimitable, the false untransformable.
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