True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

—Edith Wharton

vision originality

About Edith Wharton

Portrait of Edith Wharton

Edith Newbold Wharton (; née Jones; January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of upper-class New York society to portray, realistically, the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win...

More quotations from Edith Wharton

If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.

—Edith Wharton

Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.

—Edith Wharton

The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.

—Edith Wharton

I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.

—Edith Wharton

pain marriage misery

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

—Edith Wharton

More quotations tagged with “originality”

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

—George Bernard Shaw

thinking originality

How many scholars are there whose single book or article has generated more intellectual energy than the collected works of other, quantitatively far more 'productive,' scholars? The commensurating device known as the 'tape measure' may tell us that a Vermeer interior and a cow plop are both twenty inches across; there, however, the similarity ends.

—James C. Scott in Two Cheers for Anarchism

art thought work creativity originality

Beautiful things grow out of shit. Nobody ever believes that. Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they somehow appeared there and formed in his head—and all he had to do was write them down and they would be manifest to the world. But what I think is so interesting, and would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that's how things work. If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but and you're not one of them, you're just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life where you could say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, start from unpromising beginnings, and I'm an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.

art creativity effort originality

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

—Salvador Dali

creativity originality imitation

All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.

—John Stuart Mill

creation art originality

History

10 Nov 2017 Added