About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
—Josh Billings
Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
—Laurence J. Peter
When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.
—Anatole France
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
—Walter Lippmann
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
—Dorothy L. Sayers
Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
—Fred Allen
A will finds a way.
—Orison Swett Marden
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.
—John Stuart Mill
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
—Salvador Dali
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.
—Brian Eno
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
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
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
—Edith Wharton