It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
The devil lacks inspiration that's why he has to imitate everything. Cultivate your thoughts!
Fake sUCKs!
There is only one thing which is generally safe from plagiarism -- self-denial.
But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language.
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
Above all things -- read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
Imitation is not inspiration, and inspiration only can give birth to a work of art. The least of man's original emanation is better than the best of borrowed thought.
Successful is one whose imitators are successful.
Do not repeat after me words that you do not understand. Do not merely put on a mask of my ideas, for it will be an illusion and you will thereby deceive yourself.
Acquiring knowledge is a form of imitation.
And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man –whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyze the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.
As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself. That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything – from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.
Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those who we cannot resemble.
Men often applaud an imitation and hiss the real thing.
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.
Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.
Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation. Meditation is not concentration.
