Originality Quotes - Page 21

• Enemies are often former or potential friends who have been denied - or think that they have been denied - something.

  Idries Shah

  Thinking, Enemy, Former

  Idries Shah (1983). “Reflections”, p.124, Octagon Press Ltd

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• If you walk along the street you will encounter a number of scientific problems. Of these, about 80 per cent are insoluble, while 19½ per cent are trivial. There is then perhaps half a per cent where skill, persistence, courage, creativity and originality can make a difference. It is always the task of the academic to swim in that half a per cent, asking the questions through which some progress can be made.

  Hermann Bondi

  Creativity, Science, Persistence

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• Originality is a return to the origin.

  Antonio Gaudi

  Return

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• Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences

  Nikola Tesla

  Solitude, Influence, Intriguing

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• I advise everyone to find an island in this life. Find a place where this culture can't take energy away from you, sap your will and originality. Since anything physical can be mental, that island can be your home. Turn off the electromagnetic waves being forced upon you, the countless invisible forces coming at you all the time.

  RZA

  Inspirational, Life, Home

  The RZA (2009). “The Tao of Wu”, p.21, Penguin

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• To achieve originality we need to abandon the comforts of habit, reason, and the approval of our peers, and strike out in new directions.

  Marty Neumeier

  Comfort, Needs, Peers

  Marty Neumeier (2005). “The Brand Gap, Revised Edition”, p.76, Peachpit Press

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• Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage.

  Steve Almond

  Powerful, Political, Lazy

  "The Joke’s on You" by Steve Almond, The Baffler, No. 20, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 19, 2012.

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• Our purity lies in our originality. Our intuition lies in our innocence.

  Harbhajan Singh Yogi

  Inspirational, Lying, Bhajans

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• A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.

  Yann Martel

  Giving, Sometimes, Great Literary

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• Originality is merely an illusion.

  M. C. Escher

  Illusion

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• Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Creativity, Ideas, Common Sense

  Alfred North Whitehead (1958). “An Introduction to Mathematics”, p.116, New York : Oxford University Press, 1958 [c1948]

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• Perfection is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If you are a perfectionist, at least stop telling everybody you're one and try to get over it yourself, alone in your home with the lights off

  Augusten Burroughs

  Home, Creativity, Light

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• What audiences end up with word-wise is a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances, a movie that reeks of phoniness and lacks even minimal originality.

  Kenneth Turan

  Wise, Romance, Hollywood

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• Do not shun this maxim because it is common-place. On the contrary, take the closest heed of what observant men, who would probably like to show originality, are yet constrained to repeat. Therein lies the marrow of the wisdom of the world.

  Arthur Helps

  Lying, Men, World

  Sir Arthur Helps (1857). “Companions of My Solitude”, p.58

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• He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.

  Charles Lamb

  Book, Reading, Improvement

  Charles Lamb (1869). “The Essays of Elia and Eliana”, p.167

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

  John Dewey

  Thinking, Progress, World

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• A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Love, Life, Truth

  Jiddu Krishnamurti, Susunaga Weeraperuma (1996). “Sayings of J. Krishnamurti”, p.187, Motilal Banarsidass Publ.

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• It is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality.

  Eric Hoffer

  Fate, Achievement, Orthodoxy

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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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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• 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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• I feel like the internet also affects originality a lot, because music is so easily shared nowadays, it seems like artists have collectively explored most of the grounds that music has to offer.

  Mr. Carmack

  Artist, Internet, Music Is

  "Upfront: Mr. Carmack". Interview with Georgia Sheales, acclaimmag.com.

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• Coming to the master is coming in search of your innocence, in search of your lost childhood, in search of your originality... in search of your individuality, in search of freedom.

  Rajneesh

  Childhood, Individuality, Innocence

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