Top 100 Most Original Quotes
#1. I respect the astute and rigorously unsentimental David Horowitz as one of America's most original and courageous political analysts. He has the true 1960s spirit - audacious and irreverent, yet passionately engaged and committed to social change.
Camille Paglia
#2. Most "original" ideas aren't completely original, but instead are the result of two basic methods for generating ideas: problems in search of solutions and solutions in search of problems.
Barry Nalebuff
#3. While majority opinion may not take kindly to forms of modern art, that same majority has also been hostile to most original and radical innovations, such as automobiles or airplanes or transatlantic cables or Protestantism or the theory that the earth is round and not flat.
Alfred H. Barr Jr.
#4. The fear of vomiting, which for me is one of the most original and most acute of my fears, is actually fairly common. Emetophobia, it's called, and by some estimates, it's the fifth most common specific phobia.
Scott Stossel
#5. To be honest, writing comics is a dream come true - the form is unparalleled and is home to some of the most original and innovative storytelling around.
Adam Christopher
#6. The most original sin is not the thinker's but the poet's.
Jose Bergamin
#7. Inevitably even the most original new ideas will eventually harden into dogma or stop working for everybody.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#8. Daniel Kahneman is one of the most original and interesting thinkers of our time.
Daniel Kahneman
#9. One of the most original and most important ideas advanced by Hayek is the role of the 'division of knowledge' in economic society.
Fritz Machlup
#10. The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.
Robertson Davies
#11. Yes, influences are enriching, and they can be found in every work of art, even the most original.
Lukas Foss
#12. 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.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#14. Snoop is a tour de force! It's one of the smartest and most original books I've come across in a long time. I devoured it and then rushed over to clean up my desk and change my iPod playlist.
Richard Florida
#15. 'Doctor Who' is the most original science-fiction television series ever made. It is also one of the longest-running television shows of all time.
Jill Lepore
#16. Michelle Rodriguez is like the most original person on the planet. She's so straight up, uncensored all the time. Be ready. I love her for that.
Paul Walker
#17. It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes," [T.S. Eliot] wrote, "who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.
Ross Wetzsteon
#18. The Mirror Empire is the most original fantasy I've read in a long time, set in a world full of new ideas, expanding the horizons of the genre. A complex and intricate book full of elegant ideas and finely-drawn characters.
Adrian Tchaikovsky
#19. Roberto Calasso's survey of the renewed interest in myth demonstrates how decisive the gods' influence was on modern literature. Calasso is not only immensely learned; he is one of the most original thinkers and writers we have today.
Charles Simic
#20. I have no idea why one of our most original filmmakers would want to spend two years of his life translating someone else's movie from Spanish into English. And it wasn't such a good film in Spanish, either.
Joel Siegel
#21. The sense of form in New Mexico is for me one of the profoundest, most original, and most beautiful I have personally experienced. It must be 'learned.' . . . It is not a country of light on things. It is a country of things in light.
Marsden Hartley
#22. Most original viewers of the Mickey Mouse Club didn't face the crush of family and social problems children have today.
Annette Funicello
#23. Dr Sue Johnson is the most original contributor to couples therapy to
come along in the last thirty years. This book will touch your heart,
stimulate your mind and give you practical strategies for improving
your relationship.
William J Doherty
#24. Mr Norrell was delighted. He did not believe that anyone had ever proposed such a piece of magic before and begged Sir Walter to convey his compliments to Lord Castlereagh as the possessor of a most original brain.
Susanna Clarke
#25. To be free is to be capable of thinking one's own thoughts - not the thoughts merely of the body, or of society, but thoughts generated by one's deepest, most original, most essential and spiritual self, one's individuality.
Rudolf Steiner
#26. Well I think always, when you remake films, I always think the first one is most original, authentic.
Bai Ling
#27. His [Marx's] most explosive and indeed most original contribution to the cause of revolution was that he interpreted the compelling needs of mass poverty in political terms as an uprising, not for the sake of bread or wealth, but for the sake of freedom as well.
Hannah Arendt
#28. Geoffrey Hill may be the strongest and most original English poet of the second half of our fading century, although his work is by no means either easy or very popular. Dense, intricate, exceedingly compact, his poetry has always had great visionary force.
John Hollander
#29. The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with its touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature and defilement, still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing yet born on American soil.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#30. One of the most original and poetic works of cinema made anywhere in the seventies.
Werner Herzog
#31. Preaching is the most original thing I've ever done. There's nothing familiar about it. You have to be brave.
George Foreman
#32. Led Zeppelin is the greatest. Robert Plant is one of the most original vocalists of our time. As a rock band they deserve the kind of success they're getting.
Freddie Mercury
#33. Originality is nothing by judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.
Voltaire
#34. The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.
Alfred North Whitehead
#35. I think it's important to view the issues on the broadest possible reference plane. In fact, if you firmly believe in any issue, I urge you to read the opposite of it. Most of the time, it'll merely reinforce your original beliefs, but on the rare occasion, it might change your mind.
Michael Ramirez
#36. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.
H.L. Mencken
#37. When we seek to escape from inner conflict and pain, we are running away from unresolved childhood trauma or original pain. Most people with serious addictive natures who are in the process of recovery have found that trauma played a huge role in escalating their addictions. It certainly did for me.
Christopher Dines
#38. Michael, Eleanor is without a doubt the most beautiful woman who has ever or will ever live. If you could take a nighttime thunderstorm and turn it into a woman, you would have a very good idea what she looks like. And a fairly good idea how she behaves as well.
Tiffany Reisz
#39. The original idea was to make it easy to publish content on the Web and find an audience. What we learned from publishers is that the thing they want the most is more readers and more revenue.
Trip Adler
#40. The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.
Calvin Trillin
#41. The original sense of the word 'influence' is 'to flow into.' For the most part, these writers that I admire ... their style flows into me without my intervention, which is what explains the broad range of writers who I've been compared with; it reflects my reading.
Teju Cole
#42. I think original voices get noticed. But most importantly, I think you should have a story to tell.
Chetan Bhagat
#43. Most of the books that I've adapted I'm doing because I love the book and I feel like it's a great work of art in itself, and when it's a great book I feel as a director or a writer that I have a responsibility to rise to the level of the original. It makes me try to reach higher.
James Franco
#44. Most performers reinvent themselves. Madonna, Michael Jackson, P. Diddy. They reinvent themselves into different kinds of images. Elvis [Presley] was always himself, an original, and he never tried to be anything but that.
Pat Boone
#45. The first and most important step in the process of becoming genuinely is to be once again authenticated by the original designer.
Erwin Raphael McManus
#46. If you look back in history of the women who are most memorable and most stylish, they were never the followers of fashion. They were the ones who were unique in their style, breakers of the rules. They were authentic, genuine, original. They were not following the trends.
Nina Garcia
#47. Get a crush on the best looking, most popular, rich boy in school. How original.
Linda Kage
#48. Original discoveries, to remind you, are what counts the most. Let me put that more strongly: they are all that counts. They are the silver and gold of science.
Edward O. Wilson
#49. The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of it's benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.
Thomas Jefferson
#50. A temperate Diet frees from Diseases; such are seldom ill, but if they are surprised with Sickness, they bear it better, and recover sooner; for most Distempers have their Original from Repletion.
Benjamin Franklin
#51. The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.
Ben Macintyre
#52. To mis-quote is the very foundation of original style. The success of most writers is almost entirely due to continuous and courageous abuse of familiar misquotation.
Natalie Clifford Barney
#53. When I decided to make my version of Poe's stories, I wanted to respect the original material or to at least get closer to what his stories are really about. Most other adaptations I've seen sort of follow the story but they never satisfy me as an audience member or as a reader.
Raul Garcia
#54. The most advanced, creative and original thinking is always a product of historical context and the influences of previous geniuses, mentors, and collaborators on the mind of the originator.
Michael J. Gelb
#55. It is of great advantage to the student of any subject to read the original memoirs on that subject, for science is always most completely assimilated when it is in the nascent state ...
James Clerk Maxwell
#56. The films that I've done before were original stories most of the time, I did two adaptations before this, but they were mostly original stories where I had complete freedom to evolve in the direction I wanted.
Walter Salles
#57. Theatre outings are my favourite thing to spend money on. The most influential play I saw was 'Bent,' which starred Ian McKellen. And I loved the original performance of 'The Rocky Horror Show,' with Richard O'Brien and Tim Curry at the Royal Court, when I was about 15.
Dawn French
#58. There are only so many stories in the world ... Duplication of plots is bound to happen because most writers have read very extensively in their genre and have become aware they are adding an extra layer to the meta-narrative, finding a new spin on the original.
Kerry Greenwood
#59. I've seen the most remarkable thing. It's in the New York Public Library. They've got the original typescript of 'The Importance of Being Earnest' - all four acts of it.
Peter Shaffer
#60. I was in the original cast of 'Wicked', and that got a bad review in 'The New York Times,' and it's the most successful thing that's ever been put onstage.
Norbert Leo Butz
#61. It is ironic that Einsteins most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..] ...
Robert B. Laughlin
#62. As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.
Dinaw Mengestu
#63. Presumption is our natural and original malady. The most vulnerable and frail of all creatures is man, and at the same time the most arrogant.
Michel De Montaigne
#64. Most people think an artist tries to be original, but originality is the last thing that develops in the artist.
Lukas Foss
#65. Ben Marcus has created an innovative and unflinching portrait of the turmoil of the human condition, providing the reader a most rare gift: something truly new. Notable American Women contains strains of Donald Antrim and Samuel Beckett but is beholden to neither; it is a brave, original book.
Myla Goldberg
#66. As so often happens with Washington scandals, it isn't the original scandal that gets people in the most trouble - it's the attempted cover-up.
Tom Petri
#67. My brother and I are huge fans of foreign horror. Some of the most interesting movies are coming from overseas. I guess if there was one change we'd like to see, it would be more original horror films made by the studio system and less of a reliance on remakes.
Michael Rasmussen
#68. I adore book-to-film adaptations when they're done well, and I'm more lenient than many readers when it comes to what counts as 'done well.' For me, the most important thing is that the film maintains the spirit of the original book.
Maggie Stiefvater
#69. A man's 'original and natural right' to make all contracts that are 'intrinsically obligatory,' and to coerce the fulfillment of them, is one of the most valuable and indispensable of all human possessions.
Lysander Spooner
#70. An influential member of parliament has not only to pay much money to become such, and to give time and labour, he has also to sacrifice his mind too - at least all the characteristics part of it that which is original and most his own.
Walter Bagehot
#71. It's a truism that denials never quite catch up with charges. Honest journalists who may have mistakenly printed false information know that the most prominent retraction never quite undoes the damage done by the original publication.
Tom Wicker
#72. The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable.
Adam Smith
#73. I really dig The Byrds. I think they are the most underrated - in their original form - pop group.
Bruce Johnston
#74. Less than fifteen per cent of the people do any original thinking on any subject. The greatest torture in the world for most people is to think.
Luther Burbank
#75. Most of my cliches aren't original.
Chuck Knox
#76. To just be--to be--amidst all doings, achievings, and becomings. This is the natural state of mind, or original, most fundamental state of being. This is unadulterated Buddha-nature. This is like finding our balance.
Lama Surya Das
#77. Make genuine love the foundation life is here to enjoy in the most positive ways,not to copy others but to be an original of you.
Marcelle Hinkson
#78. It is all about being open and paying attention to the music in your head. I think most people have original music playing in their heads from time to time.
Tommy Shaw
#79. So remember these two things: you are talented and you are original. Be sure of that. I say this because self-trust is one of the very most important things in writing ...
Brenda Ueland
#80. It is a most remarkable thing. I sat down with the full intention of writing something clever and original; but for the life of me I can't think of anything clever and original
at least, not at this moment.
Jerome K. Jerome
#81. Jimmy [Dean] was the most talented and original actor I ever saw work. He was also a guerrilla artist who attacked all restrictions on his sensibility. Once he pulled a switchblade and threatened to murder his director. I imitated his style in art and in life. It got me in a lot of trouble.
Dennis Hopper
#82. ...some of the most important work that we can do as scholars may more closely resemble contemporary editorial or curatorial practices, bringing together, highlighting and remixing significant ideas in existing texts than remaining solely focused on the production of more ostensibly original texts.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
#83. John Carpenter created the idea of Halloween, so his vision remains the most focused and intelligently directed of the series. The directors that have followed have kept the original intent of the concept.
Donald Pleasence
#84. Most people in the U.K. discovered me playing a standard on Parkinson. In America, it was on VH1 singing an original called 'All At Sea,' which is a contemporary pop song. So the people that know me there tend to think of me in the singer/songwriter category.
Jamie Cullum
#85. If you can discover what you like, if you can discover what you truly believe about most of the major matters of life, you will be able to write a story which is honest and original and unique.
Dorothea Brande
#86. But it is the marriage relationship in which the changing pattern is shown up most clearly because it is the deepest one and the most arduous to maintain; and because, somehow, we mistakenly feel that failure to maintain its exact original pattern is tragedy.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
#88. When hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world went to the Yukon to look for gold, the original prospectors had already claimed most of it.
Howard Blum
#89. My experience indicates that most people who've accumulated a great deal of wealth haven't had that as their goal at all. Wealth is only a by-product, not the original motivation.
Michael Milken
#90. we must learn to see life as meaningful despite our circumstances. It emphasizes that there is an ultimate purpose to life. And in its original version, before an appendix was added, it concluded with one of the most religious sentences written in the twentieth Century:
Viktor E. Frankl
#91. Every man is born an original, but sadly, most men die copies.
Abraham Lincoln
#92. Tacit knowledge is one of the most important concepts of current scholarship in the humanities. Ambitious and important, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge is a well-written and original book.
Robert P. Crease
#93. My favorite music to sing would be my own songs, my original songs, just because I know them, you know I write the tunes, so my favorite songs are the newest ones that I write. That's what I like to sing the most, because it means something, it's real, it comes from me.
Paul McDonald
#94. I have never written a book that I wouldn't want to read. The trouble is, I love to read horror, sf, fantasy, mysteries, hero pulps - romantic fiction, in the original, traditional meaning of that term, as opposed to mimetic fiction. But most of all, I love thrillers.
F. Paul Wilson
#95. Some of the freshest, most compelling, and most soulful music I have heard recently. Bob Reynolds is an amazing musician, with something very exciting and original to say.
Joshua Redman
#96. Most people early achieve and later intensify a tendency to process new and disconfirming information so that any original conclusion remains intact. They become people of whom Philip Wylie observed: "You couldn't 't squeeze a dime between what they already know and what they will never learn."
Charlie Munger
#97. They all do the same things. They may think their sins are original, but for the most part they are petty and repetitive.
Neil Gaiman
#98. There was a lot about the Babylonians, how their religion was the original, the most authentic, how their gods were symbols for another reality, that if one could rediscover their rituals and use them as they were meant to be used, one could gain enlightenment.
Jonathan Aycliffe
#99. Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original (perhaps unrealistic) expectations. More often than not, resistance is cultural in nature, the result of what James O'Toole so aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."
John Daly
#100. David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original, and consistently excellent North American director of his generation.
J. Hoberman
