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

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

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

Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying what you think yourself.        —James Stephens

Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man’s thinking or his writing.

—Isaac Bashevis Singer

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.        —Voltaire

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

Originality is the art of concealing your source. —Franklin P. Jones

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

—Edith Wharton

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

 

There are no original ideas. There are only original people.

—Barbara Grizzuli Harrison

Originality exists in every individual because each of us differs from the others. We are all primary numbers divisible only by ourselves.

—Jean Guitton