Originality

(230 votes)   A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

Oliver Wendell Holmes
1809-1894, American Author, Wit, Poet

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(180 votes)   ORIGINALITY is unexplored territory. You get there by carrying a canoe -- you can't take a taxi.

Alan Alda
1936-, American Actor

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(126 votes)   Your manuscript is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.

Samuel Johnson
1709-1784, British Author

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(120 votes)   Everything has been said, and we have come too late, now that men have been living and thinking for seven thousand years and more.

Jean De La BruyFre
1645-1696, French Classical Writer

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(115 votes)   The most original of authors are not so because they advance what is new, but more because they know how to say something, as if it had never been said before.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
1749-1832, German Poet, Dramatist, Novelist

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(109 votes)   I found you essay to be good and original. However, the part that was original was not good and the part that was good was not original.

Samuel Johnson
1709-1784, British Author

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(103 votes)   Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.

Laurence J. Peter

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(103 votes)   The original is unfaithful to the translation.

Jorge Luis Borges
1899-1986, Argentinean Author

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(96 votes)   The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
1904-1991, Polish-born American Journalist, Writer

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(90 votes)   A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

H. L. Mencken
1880-1956, American Editor, Author, Critic, Humorist

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(80 votes)   I see nothing in it new and valuable. What is valuable is not new, and what is new is not valuable.

Daniel Webster
1782-1852, American Lawyer, Statesman

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(79 votes)   All cases are unique and very similar to others.

T. S. Eliot
1888-1965, American-born British Poet, Critic

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(77 votes)   All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.

John Stuart Mill
1806-1873, British Philosopher, Economist

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(62 votes)   Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented.

Eric Hoffer
1902-1983, American Author, Philosopher

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(58 votes)   It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated; the only question is: ''Is it true in and for itself?''

Georg Hegel
1770-1831, German Philosopher

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