Originality Quotes - Page 21

• Eccentricity is originality that leads nowhere.

  Mason Cooley

  Eccentricity

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• The genius is the man who has genuine and deep human relations with others, who does not cut himself off in the search for originality, but who realizes the value of artistic tradition.

  Ignacy Jan Paderewski

  Cutting, Men, Doe

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• True originality has its foundations in the soul, not in the mind, and when there is an effort to create something different it is usually a failure. Beethoven or Schumann or Chopin did not try to be original. They were original.

  Ignacy Jan Paderewski

  Effort, Soul, Mind

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• No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Education, Country, Art

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1404, Delphi Classics

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• Steve Grand is the creator of what I think is the nearest approach to artificial life so far, and his first book, Creation: Life and How to Make It, is as interesting as you would expect. But he illuminates more than just the properties of life: his originality extends to matter itself and the very nature of reality. Not since David Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality have I encountered such a compelling invitation to think everything out afresh, from the bottom up.

  Richard Dawkins

  Book, Reality, Thinking

  "What were you looking at?: A host of celebrity critics choose their books of the year". www.theguardian.com. December 15, 2000.

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• The actual breakthrough in the privacy of the studio, when one dares to apply paint in a new manner, is a solitary thrill, dependent upon no one else.

  Mary Carroll Nelson

  Thrill, Privacy, Paint

  Mary Carroll Nelson, Beth Ames Swartz (1984). “Connecting: the art of Beth Ames Swartz”, Northland Pub

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• Why will we be imposed on by antiquity?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Independence, Tradition, Antiquity

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.107, Xist Publishing

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• This generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us.... But the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range, are still as shallow as ever.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, This Generation, Pioneers

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.244, Courier Corporation

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• To write well, to have style ... is to paint. The master faculty of style is therefore the visual memory. If a writer does not see what he describes-countrysides and figures, movements and gestures-how could he have a style, that is originality?

  Remy de Gourmont

  Memories, Writing, Style

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• Like the theater, offering food and hospitality to people is a matter of showmanship, and no matter how simple the performance, unless you do it well, with love and originality, you have a flop on your hands.

  James Beard

  Simple, Offering, Hands

  James Beard (2015). “Delights and Prejudices”, p.212, Open Road Media

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• I always took a great deal of pride in being original.

  Roger Miller

  Pride, Being Original, Deals

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• A good imitation is the most perfect originality

  Voltaire

  Perfect, Imitation

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• It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.

  Saul Bellow

  Location, Sometimes, Should

  SAUL BELLOW (1971). “MR. SAMMLER'S PLANET”

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

  John Dewey

  Thinking, Progress, World

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• Love remains a relation with the Other that turns into need, transcendent exteriority of the other, of the beloved. But love goes beyond the beloved... The possibility of the Other appearing as an object of a need while retaining his alterity, or again,the possibility of enjoying the Other... this simultaneity of need and desire, or concupiscence and transcendence,... constitutes the originality of the erotic which, in this sense, is the equivocal par excellence.

  Emmanuel Levinas

  Erotic, Excellence, Desire

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• These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Taken, Men, Discipline

  'The Affluent Society' (1958) ch. 1, sect. 3

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• With its claims to profundity, boldness and originality, thinking still limits itself provisionally to the exclusively rational and scientific. ... As soon as it lays hold of the feelings, it becomes spirit.

  Robert Musil

  Thinking, Feelings, Limits

  Robert Musil, Burton Pike, David S. Luft (1995). “Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses”, p.43, University of Chicago Press

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• Without moving beyond a mere copy, there is no artistry, no originality or artistic advancement; only mechanics.

  Jennifer Young

  Moving, Copying, Advancement

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• The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

  Mark Twain

  Pride, Hands, Ideas

  Mark Twain (2014). “Mark Twain’s Letters & Speeches (Annotated Edition)”, p.831, Jazzybee Verlag

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• All my originality consists?in giving life in human fashion to beings which are impossible according to the laws of possibility.

  Odilon Redon

  Fashion, Law, Giving

  Quoted in Edward Lucie-Smith Symbolist Art (1972).

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• All effort at originality must end either in the quaint or the monstrous. For no man knows himself as an original; he can only believe it on the report of others.

  Washington Allston

  Believe, Men, Effort

  Washington Allston, Richard Henry Dana (1850). “Lectures on Art, and Poems”, p.174, Scholarly Pub Office Univ of

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• The authentic rebel knows that the silencing of all his adversaries is the last thing on earth he wishes: their extermination would deprive him and whoever else remains alive from the uniqueness, the originality, and the capacity for insight that these enemies being human also have and could share with him. If we wish the death of our enemies, we cannot talk about the community of man. In the losing of the chance for dialogue with our enemies, we are the poorer.

  Rollo May

  Men, Community, Enemy

  Rollo May (1998). “Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence”, p.237, W. W. Norton & Company

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• What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy.

  Joseph Pulitzer

  Clever, Style, Needs

  c.1910 Quoted in Alleyne Ireland An Adventure with a Genius, ch.4.

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• The only way to grab the attention of the audience is originality. We feed ourselves with franchises that's the opposite of what makes our culture multidimensional and interesting.

  Ron Perlman

  Opposites, Interesting, Culture

  Source: variety.com

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• Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Attitude, Lying, Physics

  High Times Interview, 2003.

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