Originality Quotes - Page 17

• Style is originality; fashion is fascism. The two are eternally and unalterably opposed.

  Lester Bangs

  Fashion, Two, Style

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• 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

  Style, Quality, Needs

  Isocrates (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Isocrates (Illustrated)”, p.274, Delphi Classics

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• We often mistake the original part of ourselves for a weakness.

  Mason Cooley

  Mistake, Weakness, Originals

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• Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Truth, Creativity

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• 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

  Independence, Mind, Doe

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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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• Vanity is the fear of appearing original: it is thus a lack of pride, but not necessarily a lack of originality.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Fear, Pride, Vanity

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Maudemarie Clark, Brian Leiter (1997). “Nietzsche: Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality”, p.168, Cambridge University Press

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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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• 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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• Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Creativity, Mind, Suffering

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1979). “Emerson's Literary Criticism”, p.164, U of Nebraska Press

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• I really believe that there is an enormous appetite amongst readers for an originality of vision. In other words, be true to your own dreams and there will always be people who want to hear them.

  Clive Barker

  Dream, Believe, People

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• What is originality? To see something that is as yet without a name, that is as yet impossible to designate, even though it staresus in the face. The way it usually is with people, it is a thing's name that makes it perceptible to them in the first place.--For the most part, the original ones have also been the name-givers.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Names, People, Way

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• Originality finds the unexpected but inevitable next step.

  Mason Cooley

  Next Steps, Unexpected, Inevitable

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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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• Every colonized people-in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality-finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.

  Frantz Fanon

  Country, Mother, People

  Frantz Fanon (1967). “Black Skin, White Masks”, p.18, Pluto Press

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• Turning popular opinion upside down does not make an original.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Doe, Opinion, Upside Down

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• 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

  Men, Names, Way

  The Gay Science bk. 3, sec. 261 (1882) (translation by Walter Kaufmann)

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• There is a crucial distinction to be made between innovation and originality. The second, unlike the first, can never break with what preceded it: to be original, an artist must also belong to the tradition from which he departs. To put it another way, he must violate the expectations of his audience, but he must also, in countless ways, uphold and endorse them.

  Roger Scruton

  Artist, Expectations, Innovation

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• The so-called ‘crank’ may be quite original in his ideas. … Invention, however, in the engineering sense involves originality; but not that alone, if the results are to be of value. There is imagination more or less fertile, but with it a knowledge of what has been done before, carried perhaps by the memory, together with a sense of the present or prospective needs in art or industry. Necessity is not always the mother of invention. It may be prevision.

  Elihu Thomson

  Mother, Art, Memories

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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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• 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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• 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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• Aurelie Sheehan's absorbing stories have depth miles beneath their compelling surface. They radiate a wisdom, beauty and originality rare in contemporary fiction.

  Frederic Tuten

  Contemporary Fiction, Depth, Stories

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• Originality is in the eye of the beholder.

  Mason Cooley

  Eye, Beholder, Eye Of The Beholder

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