We are all born originals — why is it so many of us die copies?

—Edward Young

When there is an original sound in the world, it makes a hundred echoes.          —John Shedd

Originality is unexplored territory. You get there by carrying a canoe — you can’t take a taxi.      —Alan Alda

The world in general doesn’t know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.                               —W. Somerset Maugham

The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

— Mark Twain

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.          — Laurence J. Peter

Originality is a thing we constantly clamor for, and constantly quarrel with.     —Thomas Carlyle

Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within.                                                                 —Thomas Merton

The original insight is most likely to come when elements stored in different compartments of the mind drift into the open, jostle one another, and now and then form new combinations.

—Eric Hoffer

The will to originality is not the will to be peculiar and unlike anybody else; it means the desire to derive one’s consciousness from its primary source.                                                        —Nicolas Berdyeav

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.   —Sir Cecil Beaton