Top 47 Quotes About No Originality
#1. Without moving beyond a mere copy, there is no artistry, no originality or artistic advancement; only mechanics.
Jennifer Young
#2. No man who cares about originality will ever be original. It's the man who's only thinking about doing a good job or telling the truth who becomes really original
and doesn't notice it.
C.S. Lewis
#3. No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call originality will come unsought..
C.S. Lewis
#4. Originality is not doing something no one else has ever done, but doing what has been done countless times with new life, new breath.
Marie Chapian
#5. 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
#6. In proportion as our own mind is enlarged we discover a greater number of men of originality. Commonplace people see no difference between one man and another.
Blaise Pascal
#7. Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
Fred Brooks
#8. 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
#9. Plus, if you're a copycat, you can never keep up. You're always in a passive position. You never lead; you always follow. You give birth to something that's already behind the times - just a knockoff, an inferior version of the original. That's no way to live.
Jason Fried
#10. Why should Cornishmen learn Cornish? There is no money in it, it serves no practical purpose, and the literature is scanty and of no great originality or value. The question is a fair one, the answer is simple. Because they are Cornish.
Henry Jenner
#11. Newton expected no money from establishing his originality but rather desired recognition for his excellence.
Tyler Cowen
#12. I no longer find such pleasure in that preeminently good society, of which I was once so fond. It seems to me that beneath a cloak of clever talk it proscribes all energy, all originality. If you are not a copy, people accuse you of being ill-mannered.
Stendhal
#13. Success is no proof of virtue. In the case of a book, quick acclaim is presumptive evidence of a lack of substance and originality.
Walter Kaufmann
#14. I think we ought to decide that man-hating is not only respectable but honorable. To be a misandrist a woman needs considerable ingenuity, originality, and resilience. A misogynist requires no such resources.
Joanna Russ
#15. I sang a song in Hindi; nobody even knew what that was. Singing about Native American issues, nobody did that. I had no reason to want to copy anybody else. All I had was my originality.
Buffy Sainte-Marie
#17. The thing that I was brought up to prize above everything else is the intellect. There is no problem that the intellect cannot solve, but it never had an original thought. Originality is the realm of the unconscious.
Alan Garner
#18. Only those with no memory insist on their originality.
Coco Chanel
#19. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C.S. Lewis
#20. No writer can be fully convicted of imitation except there is a concurrence of more resemblance than can be imagined to have happened by chance; as where the same ideas are conjoined without any natural series or necessary coherence, or where not only the thought but the words are copied.
Samuel Johnson
#21. Dissent is the mark of freedom, as originality is the mark of independence of mind. ... No one can be a scientist ... if he does not have independence of observation and of thought.
Jacob Bronowski
#22. All originality and no plagiarism makes for dull preaching.
Charles Spurgeon
#23. I admire anyone who can come up with something original. But not originality alone, because there can be originality in stupidity, with no musical description of any emotion or any beauty the man has seen, or any kind of life he has lived.
Charles Mingus
#24. There is no such thing as group originality, group creativity or group perspicacity.
Edwin Land
#25. No one has claim to originality in literature; all writers are more or less faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and annotators of pre-existing archetypes.
James E. Irby
#26. No one wants my painting because it is different from other people's peculiar, crazy public that demands the greatest possible degree of originality on the painter's part and yet won't accept him unless his work resembles that of the others!
Paul Gauguin
#27. He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world's store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
Milan Kundera
#28. The mark of highest originality lies in the ability to develop a familiar idea so fruitfully that it would seem no one else would ever have discovered so much to be hidden in it.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#29. To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren't any.
Les Paul
#30. There is no such thing as a completely original technique or subject.
Donald Lambert
#31. No matter what China is going to become, China will never recover her true originality if she tries to please the West on Western terms.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
#32. The standards for horror fiction should be no less than those for 'serious literary' fiction in which originality of concept, depth of characters, and attentiveness to language are vitally important.
Joyce Carol Oates
#33. 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
#34. No original thought still exists. People are original, each one of them. The same ideas that others had before you are waiting for you to bring them back to life in a new way. The part of who you are that is left behind within these old ideas is what makes them original all over again.
Ashly Lorenzana
#35. In the expression of the emotions, originality merits the first consideration ... The words used, however, should be old ones.
Fujiwara No Teika
#36. It is not permitted to a man, who takes up pen or chisel, to seek originality, for passion is his only business, and he cannot but mould or sing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another.
William Butler Yeats
#37. The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.
Blaise Pascal
#38. Oratory is good only if it has the qualities of fitness for the occasion, propriety of style, and originality of treatment, while in the case of letters there is no such need whatsoever.
Isocrates
#39. Cinema reflects culture and there is no harm in adapting technology, but not at the cost of losing your originality.
Jackie Chan
#40. Both the 18th and the early 20th centuries, however, feature brilliant attacks on originality, and it's no doubt one of the hallmarks of romanticism to care about originality and suppose with a sometimes naive spontaneity that it's all that matters.
Paul Fry
#41. Those who say there are no more original ideas need to get out of the way of those of us who are creating them.
Steven Symes
#42. Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.
James Stephens
#43. What we call originality is no more than ignorance of antecedents.
Dee Hock
#44. It is part of the amazing originality of Christ that there is to be found in his teaching no word whatever which suggests a difference in the spiritual ideals, the spheres, or the potentialities of men and women.
Maude Royden
#45. What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#46. The ordinary American voter does not object to mediocrity. He likes his candidate to be sensible, vigorous, and, above all, what he calls 'magnetic,' and does not value, because he sees no need for, originality or profundity, a fine culture or a wide knowledge.
James Bryce
#47. Books only spoil the originality of genius. Very well for those who can't think for themselves - But when one has made up one's opinions, there is no use in reading.
Maria Edgeworth
