The first man to compare the cheeks of a
young woman to a rose was obviously a poet;
the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.
?Salvador Dali
Men often applaud an imitation
and hiss the real thing.
?Aesop
A mere copier of nature can never
produce anything great.
?Joshua Reynolds
All truly wise thoughts have been thought
already thousands of times; but to make them
truly ours, we must think them over again honestly,
till they take root in our personal experience.
?Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Original thought is like original sin: both
happened before you were born to people
you could not have possibly met.
?Fran Lebowitz
The more original a discovery, the more
obvious it seems afterwards.
?Arthur Koestler
What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.
?Dean Inge
When there is an original sound in the
world, it makes a hundred echoes.
?John A. Shedd
Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.
?Thomas W. Higginson
The man with a new idea is a
crank until the idea succeeds.
?Mark Twain
Originality is the essence of true scholarship.
Creativity is the soul of the true scholar.
?Nnamdi Azikiwe
The merit of originality is not novelty; it
is sincerity. The believing man is the
original man; whatsoever he believes, he
believes it for himself, not for another.
?Thomas Carlyle
