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Originality is about inventiveness and novelty

• Original: Not dependent on other people’s ideas; inventive or novel.  Oxford Dictionary
• Original: An original piece of work, such as a painting, etc. is produced by the artist and not a copy.  Cambridge Dictionary
• Original: New; fresh; inventive; novel.  Dictionary.com
• Incubation,  Creativity,  Innovation,  Imagination,  Inventiveness,  Boldness,  Resourcefulness,   Genius

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Originality is the mark of genius

• Our creative genius is the fountainhead of originality. It fires our compulsion to evolve. It inspires us to challenge norms. Creative genius is about flying to new heights on untested wings. It is about the danger of crashing. Gordon MacKenzie
• The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers. Arthur Koestler
• When human power becomes so great and original that we can account for it only as a kind of divine imagination, we call it genius. William Crashaw
• Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary. Warren G. Bennis
• Genius

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Originality can be a great force for good

• All good things which exist are the fruits of originality. John Stuart Mill
• Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation profoundly affecting the roots of human spirit. Ansel Adams

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To be original, learn how to think creatively

• Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. George Lois
• Creativity is for us all – it’s about you, me, and about everyday life. It is about the abundant originality we manifest, and our flexible improvisations, whether teaching a class, raising our kids, fixing the car, helping a client, landscaping the yard, planning a benefit, or trying to figure out why we’re on earth. Ruth Richards
• Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality. Arthur Koestler
• Creativity is the ideas expressed after summoning everything you’ve learned and disregarding everything you know. It’s the ability to get out of the way of one’s originality and imagination. Dan Greenberger
• Creativity, which is the expression of our originality, helps us stay mindful that what we bring to the world is completely original and cannot be compared. Brené Brown
• I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. Sir Ken Robinson
• Originality is the essence of true scholarship. Creativity is the soul of the true scholar. Nnamdi Azikiwe
• 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
• Creative thinking

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To be original, express your own ideas

• If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Rollo May
• Ideas

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To be original, be prepared to be wrong

• If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. Sir Ken Robinson
• Mistakes are the only universal form of originality. Mason Cooley
• Mistakes

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To be original, be bold enough to go beyond accepted norms

• Originality implies being bold enough to go beyond accepted norms. Anthony Storr
• No one ever discovered anything new by coloring inside the lines. Thomas Vasquez
• A man of great common sense and good taste is a man without originality or moral courage. George Bernard Shaw

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To be original, be prepared to attract wrath from others

• Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning rods draw the flashes. Theodor Reik
• 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. Somerset Maugham
• Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with. Thomas Carlyle
• Criticism,  Rejection

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After all, originality is a form of rebellion

• True rebels hate their own rebellion. They know by experience that it is not a cool and glamorous lifestyle; it takes a courageous fool to say things that have not been said and to do things that have not been done. Criss Jami
• Originality is the best form of rebellion. Mike Sasso
• That which is original creates a new origin. That which is original, by definition, must stray off the previously worn paths. It must wander; it must err. Blake Charlton

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To be original, don’t be a copy cat

• The best way to be original is to not copy anyone. Sebastyne Young
• Plus, if you’re a copycat, you can never keep up. You’re always in a passive position. You never lead; you always follow. You give birth to something that’s already behind the times—just a knockoff, an inferior version of the original. That’s no way to live. Jason Fried
• Originality exists in every individual because each of us differs from the others. We are all primary numbers divisible only by ourselves. Jean Guitton
• Xerox never comes up with anything original.
• Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else and failing. Raymond Radiguet
• Follow your own path

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To be original, focus on your field of natural talent

• Every man has a specific skill, whether it is discovered or not, that more readily and naturally comes to him than it would to another, and his own should be sought and polished. He excels best in his niche – originality loses its authenticity in one’s efforts to obtain originality. Criss Jami
• Talent

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To be original, be sincere and tell your own truth

• Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. C. S. Lewis
• Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself. James Stephens
• The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. Thomas Carlyle
• Originality is independence, not rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism. George Henry Lewes
• When we discover that the truth is already in us, we are all at once our original selves. Dogen
• Truth

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To be original, familiarise yourself with the ideas of others

• It seems to be one of the paradoxes of creativity that in order to think originally, we must familiarize ourselves with the ideas of others. George Kneller
• Keep on the lookout for novel ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you’re working on. Thomas Alva Edison
• Learning,  Collaboration,  Cooperation

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To be original, spend time in solitude

• Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous — to poetry. Thomas Mann
• Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest. Mike Norton
• The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude. Aldous Huxley
• Solitude

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Originality requires hard work and struggle

• Originality and a feeling of one’s own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Hard work,  Effort,  Perseverance

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Originality requires a new vision

• True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. Edith Wharton
• Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes. Thomas W. Higginson
• Vision

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Originality requires courage, will and self-belief

• We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate. We cannot derive a sense of absolute certitude from anything which has its roots in us. The most poignant sense of insecurity comes from standing alone and we are not alone when we imitate. It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay. Bruce Lee
• The burden of originality is one that most people don’t want to accept. They’d rather sit in front of the TV and let that tell them what they’re supposed to like, what they’re supposed to buy, and what they’re supposed to laugh at. Marilyn Manson
• It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur. Wallace Stevens
• Courage,  Will power,  Self-belief,  Self-confidence

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Be open to original ideas

• Listen to anyone with an original idea, no matter how absurd it may sound at first. If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need. William McKnight

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To expose yourself to original ideas, read widely

• An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them. Stephen Fry
• We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own. Harold Bloom
• Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all. Abraham Lincoln
• Reading,  Knowledge

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Borrow from and be inspired by the original ideas of others

• Originality is undetected plagiarism. Dean William R.Inge
• We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day. Dave Eggers
• All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. T. S. Eliot
• Imitation, if noble and general, insures the best hope of originality. Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
• Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another. Voltaire
• To be creative you have to contribute something different from what you’ve done before. Your results need not be original to the world; few results truly meet that criterion. In fact, most results are built on the work of others. Lynne C. Levesque
• 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 Kundera
• Art builds upon art, builds upon art…nothing is purely original. We’re all inspired by something…or someone. It’s a never- ending chain of ideas…and it’s magical. Shannon Taylor Hodnett
• About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment. Josh Billings
• Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.” Jim Jarmusch

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Take existing ideas and transform them in an original way

• 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 Heidegger
• What the world calls originality is only an unaccustomed method of tickling it. George Bernard Shaw

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Take existing ideas and adapt them to your own problem in an original way

• Keep on the lookout for novel ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you’re working on. Thomas Alva Edison

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Be an original, not a copy

• We are all born originals. Why is it so many of us die copies? Edward Young
• You were born an original … Don’t die a copy. John Mason
• Give your flesh back to your mother and your bones back to your father and then show me your original face. Zen saying
• Insist upon yourself. Be original. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• You’ve gotta be original, because if you’re like someone else, what do they need you for? Bernadette Peters

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Better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation

• It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. Herman Melville
• A poor original is better than a good imitation. Ella Wheeler Wilcox
• Failure,  Success

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An over-reliance on quotations can get in the way of original thought

• An apt quotation is as good as an original remark. Proverb
• A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought. Dorothy L. Sayers
• I always have a quotation for everything—it saves original thinking. Dorothy L. Sayers
• Quotations

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Originality is the art of forgetting

• Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it. Peter Laurence
• Only those with no memory insist on their originality. Coco Chanel
• The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know. Arthur Koestler

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More thoughts

• A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world’s ignorance and press for admission. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
• Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible. Richard P. Feynman
• The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards. Arthur Koestler
• The sole concern of learning is to seek one’s original heart. Mencius
• Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known. Chuck Palahniuk
• An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate. Dan Vyleta
• As a rule, I am very careful to be shallow and conventional where depth and originality are wasted. Lucy Maud Montgomery
• Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of. John Stuart Mill
• Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. Flaubert

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• Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it. Peter Laurence
• Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.
• Only those with no memory insist on their originality. Coco Chanel
• About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment. Josh Billings
• An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them. Stephen Fry
• Don’t worry about people stealing an idea; if it’s original you will have to ram it down their throats. Howard Hathaway Aiken
• Originality : The art of concealing your source.  Franlkin P.Jones
• Originality is undetected plagiarism. Dean William R.Inge
• He has left off reading altogether to the great improvement of his originality. Charles Lamb
• I don’t own any of my own paintings because a Picasso original costs several thousand dollars and that’s a luxury I cannot afford. Pablo Picasso
• My one claim to originality among Irishmen is that I never made a speech. George Moore
• Nowadays, all a man can do to be original is to cite the earliest known quote on that subject. Women, though, have no problem being original. In fact, women are always being original. I constantly have to tell my wife to stop talking so much nonsense. Benson Bruno
• Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met. Fran Lebowitz
• Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else and failing. Raymond Radiguet
• Xerox never comes up with anything original.
• Your manuscript is both good and original but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good. Samuel Johnson I always have a quotation for everything, it saves original thinking.  Dorothy L. Sayers
• Should we all confess our sins to one another we would all laugh at one another for our lack of originality. Kahlil Gibran

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