Imitation Quotes - Page 12

• The good of the governed is the end, and rewards and punishments are the means, of all government. The government of the supreme and all-perfect Mind, over all his intellectual creation, is by proportioning rewards to piety and virtue, and punishments to disobedience and vice. ... The joys of heaven are prepared, and the horrors of hell in a future state, to render the moral government of the universe perfect and complete. Human government is more or less perfect, as it approaches nearer or diverges further from an imitation of this perfect plan of divine and moral government.

  John Adams

  Mean, Punishment, Government

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• If we think we are usually good, then God is usually irrelevant... Such thinking ignores the depths of sin in my own heart, and, in essence, it elevates me so that I am just a mildly flawed imitation of God rather than someone completely dependent on Him.

  Edward T Welch

  Heart, Thinking, Essence

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• It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.

  Northrop Frye

  Block, Emotional, Thinking

  Northrop Frye (2015). “Anatomy of Criticism”, p.83, Princeton University Press

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• In 'Imitation of Life', I was showing how a girl might feel under the circumstances, but I am not showing how I felt.

  Fredi Washington

  Girl, Might, Circumstances

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• Too rich to be relevant to the world's poor, [Europe] attracts immigration but cannot encourage imitation. Too passive regarding international security. Too self-satisfied, it acts as if its central political goal is to become the worlds most comfortable retirement home. Too set in its ways, it fears multicultural diversity

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Retirement, Home, Self

  Zbigniew Brzezinski (2012). “Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power”, p.39, Hachette UK

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• It is easy today to deny God's creativity as a thing of the benighted past, overcome by science, but man's creativity, a thing much more improbable and nothing but an imitation of God's, exercises a strange attraction.

  Allan Bloom

  Creativity, Exercise, Men

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.182, Simon and Schuster

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• I now make it my earnest prayer that God would have you and the State over which you preside in His holy protection; that He would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacific temper of mind which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion, without an humble imitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy nation.

  George Washington

  Prayer, Blessed, Humble

  Circular Letter to the Governours of the several States, June 18, 1783.

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• Whatever the gender of the participants, all pornography including male-male gay pornography is an imitation of the male-female, conqueror-victim paradigm, and almost all of it actually portrays or implies enslaved women and master.

  Gloria Steinem

  Gay, Males, Female

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• Tragedy is an imitation not of men but of a life, an action

  Aristotle

  Men, Tragedy, Action

  Aristotle, Gerald Frank Else (1970). “Poetics”, p.27, University of Michigan Press

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• There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Strong, Mind, Culture

  Interview with David Attwell, www.dn.se. December 8, 2003.

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• Ignorance and a narrow education lay the foundation of vice, and imitation and custom rear it up.

  Mary Astell

  Ignorance, Vices, Foundation

  Mary Astell (2002). “A Serious Proposal to the Ladies”, p.67, Broadview Press

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• Outstanding past work in photography, and in fact in all the arts, is very important to today's photographers. But it should be used for inspiration and not for imitation. These works should be something to be built upon, not to be repeated.

  Alexey Brodovitch

  Photography, Art, Inspiration

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• Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear and pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be great than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design.

  Aristotle

  Air, Design, Tragedy

  Aristotle (0101). “The Poetics of Aristotle”, p.18, Prabhat Prakashan

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• I believe it is no wrong Observation, that Persons of Genius, and those who are most capable of Art, are always fond of Nature, as such are chiefly sensible, that all Art consists in the Imitation and Study of Nature. On the contrary, People of the common Level of Understanding are principally delighted with the Little Niceties and Fantastical Operations of Art, and constantly think that finest which is least Natural.

  Alexander Pope

  Art, Believe, Thinking

  Alexander Pope, William Roscoe (1824). “The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq: With Notes and Illustrations by Himself and Others. To which are Added, a New Life of the Author, an Estimate of His Poetical Character and Writings, and Occasional Remarks,”, p.397

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• News at Work is a vivid, inside look at the collision of print journalism and electronic media. Based on close access to the leading news organizations in Buenos Aires, Boczkowski documents how contemporary journalism is caught in the grip of emulation; this spiral of imitation exacerbated further by global news media and their intensifying homogenization. The portrait of this transformation of the news is both fascinating and deeply worrying, and is guaranteed to provoke debate.

  Walter W. Powell

  Media, Organization, Worry

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• Greek customs such as wine drinking were regarded as worthy of imitation by other cultures. So the ships that carried Greek wine were carrying Greek civilization, distributing it around the Mediterranean and beyond, one amphora at a time. Wine displaced beer to become the most civilized and sophisticated of drinks—a status it has maintained ever since, thanks to its association with the intellectual achievements of Ancient Greece.

  Tom Standage

  Drinking, Wine, Beer

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• Imitation is the first instinct of the awakening mind.

  Maria Montessori

  Mind, Awakening, Firsts

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• So, then, the best of the historian is subject to the poet; for whatsoever action or faction, whatsoever counsel, policy, or war-stratagem the historian is bound to recite, that may the poet, if he list, with his imitation make his own, beautifying it both for further teaching and more delighting, as it pleaseth him; having all, from Dante’s Heaven to his Hell, under the authority of his pen.

  Philip Sidney

  War, Teaching, Heaven

  Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Babington Macaulay (2010). “English Essays: From Sir Philip Sidney to Macaulay”, p.23, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Truth is the nursing mother of genius. No man can be absolutely true to himself, eschewing cant, compromise, servile imitation, and complaisance without becoming original.

  Margaret Fuller

  Mother, Truth, Nursing

  Margaret Fuller, Bell Gale Chevigny (1976). “The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings”, p.187, UPNE

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• Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna — the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.

  M. John Harrison

  Dream, Cities, Paris

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• In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons.

  Max Weber

  Jesus, Culture, Rooms

  Max Weber, Hans Gerth (1991). “From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology”, p.357, Psychology Press

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• My chief virtue (or if you like, defect) has been a tireless lifelong search for an original, individual musical idiom. I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices.

  Sergei Prokofiev

  Musical, Virtue, Individual

  "Sergei Prokofiev: Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences". Book by Sergei Prokofiev, Edited by S. Shlifstein and translated by Rose Prokofieva, p. 7, 1960.

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• Art does not begin with imitation, but with discipline.

  Sun Ra

  Art, Discipline, Design

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• If imitation is the greatest form of flattery,
  Punk, don't flatter me.

  J-Ro

  Rap, Hip Hop, Flattery

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• Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.

  Albert Camus

  Religious, Art, Mean

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.270, Vintage

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