Originality Quotes

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

“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."

[MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]”
― Jim Jarmusch

“I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.”
― Frank Zappa

“An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.”
― Stephen Fry

“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, Killosophy

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“You have to do stuff that average people don't understand because those are the only good things.”
― Andy Warhol

“All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Creative people are often found either disagreeable or intimidating by mediocrities.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.”
― Marie Antoinette

“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, White Mountain

“Only those with no memory insist on their originality.”
― Coco Chanel

“He: "Whale you be my valentine?" She: "Dolphinitely.”
― Adam Young

“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, Venus in Arms

“Create with the heart; build with the mind.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“When you have wit of your own, it's a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“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

“A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”
― Dorothy Sayers , Gaudy Night

“Absurdity and anti—absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.”
― Karl Lagerfeld

“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, American Gods

“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'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

“Anymore, no one's mind is their own.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

“Sometimes we have to behave indifferent towards people who proclaim their love to us, just to see if they are really different.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“The small are always dependent on the great; they are "small" precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other "greats" and who can transform it in an original manner.”
― Martin Heidegger

“What is the point of being on this Earth if you are going to be like everyone else?”
― Arnold Schwarzenegger, Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

“A poor original is better than a good imitation.”
― Ella Wheeler Wilcox

“Any fool can do something cool and look cool, but it takes skill to make something uncool cool again.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.”
― François-René de Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity or the Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion