Mark Twain Quotes About Originality

• A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

  Mark Twain

  Inspirational, Success, Good Life

  1897 Following the Equator, ch.32.

• What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

  Mark Twain

  Wisdom, Book, Beer

  Notebook, 2 July 1867

• 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

• The Bible is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. This Bible is built mainly out of fragments of older Bibles that had their day and crumbled to ruin. So it noticeably lacks in originality, necessarily. Its three or four most imposing and impressive events all happened in earlier Bibles; there are only two new things in it: hell, for one, and that singular heaven I have told you about.

  Mark Twain

  Clever, Lying, Blood

• Wherein lies a poet's claim to originality? That he invents his incidents? No. That he was present when his episodes had their birth? No. That he was first to repeat them? No. None of these things has any value. He confers on them their only originality that has any value, and that is his way of telling them.

  Mark Twain

  Lying, Way, Firsts

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