Men often applaud an imitation and hiss the real thing.
Make a technical contribution; innovate, don't emulate.
Writers tend to consider distinction and originality as virtues, but they are anathema to publishers.
It's incumbent on good public servants to maintain their voices and originality of thinking.
To overestimate the originality of one's thoughts is perhaps a less serious defect than being unaware of their newness. There is a more pronounced lack of sensitivity in underestimating (ourselves and others) than in overestimating.
It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.
People are always talking about originality, but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us, and this goes on to the end.
Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
The modern child may early in his or her existence have natural inclinations toward spirituality. The child may have imagination, originality, a simple and individual response to reality, and even a tendency to moments of thoughtful silence and absorption. All these tendencies, however, are soon destroyed by the dominant culture. The child becomes a yelling, brash, false little monster, brandishing a toy gun or dressed up like some character he has seen on television.
Your turn has come to sift through the dreck of humanity for rare specks of originality
While an original is always hard to find, he is easy to recognize.
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 ". . . every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
Many have original minds who do not think it - they are led away by custom!
Originality exists in every individual because each of us differs from the others. We are all primary numbers divisible only by ourselves.
The proponents of Steinitz' theory - Tarrasch and his supporters - tried to express Steinitz' teaching in the form of laconic rules, and as often happens in such cases, they went too far. The laconic tended to become dogmatic, and chess began to lose its freshness, originality and charm.
Originality irritates so obscurely that people may have to evolve to scratch it.
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.
Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.
Some people say I was very brave, but I really just didn't know any better. All I had was my originality.