Originality quotations

Page 3

◆ No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.

- Neil Gaiman99

◆ The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

- Blaise Pascal99

◆ Because even among contrarians, I'm a contrarian. But all of this is just words of bronze, third place rhetoric. What do I really mean when I say we want to shock society into awareness? Do we mean we want more originality and individuality? Less TV, more reading, writing, actual thinking? Less sheep, more shepherd pie? Yes, yes, and a little more pie, please. Oh, and some more sweet tea, too

- Jarod Kintz99

◆ 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 Kundera99

◆ When you have wit of your own, it's a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.

- Criss Jami99

◆ All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

- Michael Chabon99

◆ Originality is the best form of rebellion.

- Mike Sasso99

◆ What is the point of being on this Earth if you are going to be like everyone else?

- Arnold Schwarzenegger99

◆ Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our integrity and awareness, the more original and creative our time will become.

- John O'Donohue99

◆ Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest.

- Mike Norton99

◆ Creative people are often found either disagreeable or intimidating by mediocrities.

- Criss Jami99

◆ A poor original is better than a good imitation.

- Ella Wheeler Wilcox99

◆ 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 Fried99

◆ Any fool can do something cool and look cool, but it takes skill to make something uncool cool again.

- Criss Jami99

◆ If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.

- Quentin Crisp99