There are many copycats. There is only one
you. Act accordingly.
A Few Thoughts on
Originality
"Think for yourself and let others do the same.”
Voltaire
”No one can possibly succeed in business by being a conformist.”
J. Paul Getty
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that
envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Robert Frost
“Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it
again.”
Goethe
"Originality exists in every individual because each of us differs from the
others. We are all primary numbers divisible only by ourselves."
Jean Guitton
"Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done
something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Originality Plus Perseverance Equals Genius
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps
it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him keep step to music which he
hears, however measured or far away.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Think wrongly if you please, but in all cases, think for yourself.”
Doris Lessing
“Few people think more than two or
three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself thinking
once or twice a week.”
George Bernard Shaw
“It is better to fail in originality
than to succeed in imitation.”
Herman Melville
“A lot of cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the
original.”
Louis Armstrong
And Finally
"If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him."
Casey Stengel
This page was compiled by
Criswell Freeman, Psy.D.
