#origin

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult - at least I have found it so - than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind...We behold the face of nature bright with gladness...We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects and seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#life

When your efforts run in the face of conventional wisdom and accepted mastery, persistence can look like madness. If you succeed in the end, this extreme originality reformulates into a new level of mastery, sometimes even genius; if you fail in the end, you remain a madman in the eyes of others, and maybe even yourself. When you are in the midst of the journey…there’s really no way of knowing which one you are.” (p.129) ↗

— Hilary Austen

#conventional-wisdom #effort #extreme-originality #genius #journey

The artist's duty is to defend the exceptional: the imagination. ↗

— Marty Rubin

#imagination #originality #art

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#originality #unique #thought

All novels are sequels; influence is bliss. ↗

— Michael Chabon

#cliche #novels #originality #writing #influence

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. ↗

— Alexis de Tocqueville

#copies #few #gallery #many #originals

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had." [Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999] ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#creativity #originality #point-of-view #uniqueness #writing

I find that the very things that I get criticized for, which is usually being different and just doing my own thing and just being original, is the very thing that's making me successful. ↗

— Shania Twain

#being different #criticized #different #doing #find

Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing. ↗

— Dave Barry

#anybody #clothing #golf #hideous #open

Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#impresses #nearly #originality #our #sensibility