No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.
Neil GaimanTags: life originality hope tragedy isolation islands insulation
Our lack of originality is something we usefully forget as we hunch over our—to us—ever-fascinating lives. My friend M., leaving his wife for a younger woman, used to complain, “People tell me it’s a cliché. But it doesn’t feel like a cliché to me.” Yet it was, and is. As all our lives would prove, if we could see them from a greater distance—from the viewpoint, say, of that higher creature imagined by Einstein.
Julian BarnesTags: life originality cliche
The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.
Blaise PascalTags: originality intellect
He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
Milan KunderaTags: originality ideas independent-thought influence thoughts
The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.
Malcolm GladwellTags: originality journalism plagiarism
A poor original is better than a good imitation.
Ella Wheeler WilcoxTags: imagination art originality
Originality is putting its pants on while orthodoxy is ready to deliver.
Santosh KalwarTags: originality orthodoxy pants
Unlike a fountain that circulates the same water in an enclosed, perpetually recycling system, a human being circulates thoughts in an unlimited reservoir of self.
Don't limit yourself to being a mere fountain when you contain an ocean.
Tags: thinking originality thought ocean depth limits original fountain
The small are always dependent on the great; they are "small" precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other "greats" and who can transform it in an original manner.
Martin HeideggerTags: originality nietzche
The best way to be original is to not copy anyone.
Riina Rinkineva aka. Sebastyne YoungTags: writing originality creativity
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