Originality Quotes

When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.

~ Criss Jami

Anymore, no one's mind is their own.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.

~ Stephen Fry

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

~ T.s. Eliot

Our ancestors have invented, we can at least innovate.

~ Amit Kalantri

One does not have to be a philosopher to be a successful artist, but he does have to be an artist to be a successful philosopher. His nature is to view the world in an unpredictable albeit useful light.

~ Criss Jami

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn't tell you, though e try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop. ...It is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can't give you the first syllable of reality, at any cot, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can't help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand.

~ Nelson Algren

Think outside the box? Indeed. But to add balance to that, one should not in the process forget what the inside of the box looks like as well. Those who are best at thinking outside the box do it not to puff themselves up, but to see how small they really are. As a contented fish in its fish tank appears to have a small, boring existence to us, imagine a larger, more perceptive kingdom (even by scientific taxonomy) to whom our contented existences may appear to be small and boring. This is where true creativity and massive perceptive abilities spawn a sense of intellectual humility; the kind which God adores.

~ Criss Jami

originality and a feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You can't be a rebel without the scars that come with it. Truth is, some days scars are just as ugly as they are beautiful.

~ Criss Jami

I'd rather be interesting, original, & unique then follow the pack. Revel in who you truly are & be liberated!

~ Amy Leigh Mercree

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 Gaiman

In order to share one's true brilliance one initially has to risk looking like a fool: genius is like a wheel that spins so fast, it at first glance appears to be sitting still.

~ Criss Jami

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 Norton

I need not adapt in certain ways. I am in fact but a visitor to this world, an ephemeral gasp within its long, tired history, and, before anything else, a follower of Christ. By this alone I have the power not to shuffle away from the Faith, the power to break loose from these marching-shackles of ongoing cultural and political pretense.

~ Criss Jami

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999]

~ Anna Quindlen

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

~ François-René De Chateaubriand

All novels are sequels, influence is bliss.

~ Michael Chabon

Is it possible to say It was a beautiful morning at the end of November without feeling like Snoopy?

~ Umberto Eco

The best way to be original is to not copy anyone.

~ Sebastyne Young

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to. #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]

~ Jim Jarmusch

I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand,that Joplin had the last drunken throat,that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.

~ Patti Smith

Art builds upon art, builds upon art...nothing is purely original. We're all inspired by something...or someone. It's a never-ending chain of ideas...and it's magical.

~ Shannon Taylor Hodnett

When most of the greatest individuals in history were misunderstood and you've spent so much of your own adult life misunderstood, you can't help but believe that the majority of people know very little worth knowing.

~ Criss Jami

Dare to research on the originality of any information.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

All Authors come from the unified countrynent known as Australia. Authors live in the future where love is external.

~ Will Advise

Pure wisdom is the 'fruit of life' banal platitudes are the 'bane of existence'.

~ Criss Jami

It's neither judgment nor judgment according to the status quo that we have a problem with, but rather judgment according to God's Word that we have a problem with. We sharply dress ourselves, go out into the world, shape ourselves, our personalities according to the world's standards and preferences, allow ourselves to be made dull by the world and its desires in order to appear successful and happy and attractive in the eyes of the world. We love the world's judgment but we hate God's judgment. Absurdly enough, the one that really matters, the one out of the purest of loves rather than a mere contract in hopes of mutual gain, is the one which we so adamantly try to shut ourselves off from.

~ Criss Jami

Get off the treadmill of consumption, replication, and mediocrity. Begin lifting the weights of creativity, originality, and success.

~ Ryan Lilly

Every man has a specific skill, whether it is discovered or not, that more readily and naturally comes to him than it would to another, and his own should be sought and polished. He excels best in his niche - originality loses its authenticity in one's efforts to obtain originality.

~ Criss Jami

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

~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

It is imperative you stay in touch with your inner self so you don’t lose the essence of who you truly are.

~ Omoakhuana Anthonia

Our novice runs the risk of failure without additional traits: a strong inclination toward originality, a taste for research, and a desire to experience the incomparable gratification associated with the act of discovery itself.

~ Santiago Ramón Y Cajal

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.

~ Abraham Lincoln

I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.

~ Frank Zappa

It is difficult to stop people from thinking on their own and exceedingly so, to get them to think on their own.

~ Mamur Mustapha

If ever it's necessary to ride the bandwagon, it's done with one leg swinging out and eyes scoping the fields.

~ Criss Jami

If we had to earn our age by thinking for ourselves at least once a year, only a handful of people would reach adulthood.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Stay true to yourself. An original is worth more than a copy.

~ Suzy Kassem