#origin

Knowing how to paint and to use one's colors rightly has not any connection with originality. This originality consists in properly expressing your own impressions. ↗

— Thomas Couture

#colors #connection #consists #expressing #how

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book. ↗

— Edward Gibbon

#book #composition #habits #i #learning

Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void. ↗

— Barnett Newman

#communication #existentialism #expression #origins #the-void

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

all men and all women are connected by an energy which many people call love, but which is, in fact, the raw material from which the universe was built. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#origin #love

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

Creative people are often found either disagreeable or intimidating by mediocrities. ↗

— Criss Jami

#creative #creativity #disagreeable #envy #intimidating

... the pursuit of origins is a way of rescuing territory from death and oblivion, a reconquest that ought to be patient, devoted, relentless and faithful. ↗

— Amin Maalouf

#genealogy #origins #death