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Originality
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Be yourself. The world worships the
original.
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-Ingrid Bergman
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The merit of originality is not novelty;
it is sincerity.
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-Thomas Carlyle
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. . . originality consists of the achievement
of new combinations, and not of the creation of something out of nothing.
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-Richard V. Clemence
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Do not go where the path may lead; go
instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
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-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When people are free to do as they please,
they usually imitate each other.
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-Eric Hoffer
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~There is not so poor a
book in the world that would not be a prodigious effort were it wrought out
entirely by a single mind, without the aid of prior investigators.
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-Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell's
Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791
July 28, 1763
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He has left off reading altogether, to the
great improvement of his originality.
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-Charles Lamb
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*When truths are once
known to us, though by tradition, we are apt to be favorable to our own
parts and ascribe to our own understandings the discovery of what, in
reality, we borrowed from others-or, at least, finding we can prove what
at first we learn from others, we are forward to conclude it an obvious
truth, which, if we had sought, we could not have missed. Nothing seems
hard to our understandings that is once known; and because what we see, we
see with our own eyes, we are apt to overlook or forget the help we had
from others who showed it us and first made us see it, as if we were not
at all beholden to them for those truths they opened the way to and led
us into. For knowledge being only of truths that are perceived to be so,
we are favorable enough to our own faculties to conclude, that they of
their own strength would have attained those discoveries, without any
foreign assistance, and that we know those truths by the strength and
native light of our own minds, as they did from whom we received them by
theirs, only they had the luck to be before us. Thus the whole stock of
human knowledge is claimed by everyone as his private possession, as soon
as he (profiting by other's discoveries) has got it into this own mind-and
so it is-but not properly by his own single industry nor of his own
acquisition.
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-John Locke
The Reasonableness of Christianity as
Delivered in the Scriptures, 1695
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Think for thyself one good idea,
but known to be thine own;
Is better than a thousand gleaned,
from fields by others sown.
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-Alexander Wilson
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