#imitation

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#individuality #invention #beauty

Those who do not succeed do not believe in their ability to exercise the potential power to forge beyond perceptions of limitations. ↗

— T.F. Hodge

#exercise #forge #limitations #limits #perceptions

The ones that landed near the bathroom are Bad Tolkien imitations or transcripts of a D&D adventure; bad Herbert, Heinlein, and Asimov are below the television; and these on the bed are the ones whose authors I want to hunt down personally and slap. ↗

— Sharyn McCrumb

#fanfiction #imitation #literary-criticism #literary-criticism

A prudent man will always try to follow in the footsteps of great men and imitate those who have been truly outstanding, so that, if he is not quite as skillful as they, at least some of their ability may rub off on him. ↗

— Niccolò Machiavelli

#greatness #imitation #learning #men

I don't know what makes someone hip. The goal is artist achievement and the best work we can do with no limitation. ↗

— Rick Rubin

#artist #best #best work #goal #hip

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. ↗

— John F. Kennedy

#arrogance #cleanses #concern #corrupts #diversity

When you do an interview with me, you're talking to a cheap imitation of the person that I really am. There's no magic in my words, it's just me talking. ↗

— John Mayer

#cheap #i #imitation #interview #just

When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them. ↗

— Evelyn Waugh

#get #keep #limitations #our #them

In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions. Those that fit with the reality of our nature and the world produce greater power and scope for our abilities and a deeper joy and fulfillment. Experimentation, risk, and making mistakes bring growth only if, over time, they show us our limits as well as our abilities. If we only grow intellectually, vocationally, and physically through judicious constraints–why would it not also be true for spiritual and moral growth? Instead of insisting on freedom to create spiritual reality, shouldn’t we be seeking to discover it and disciplining ourselves to live according to it? ↗

— Timothy Keller

#freedom #growth #limitation #age

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. ↗

— Robert M. Pirsig

#grades #imitation #learning #rhetoric #school