The Truth About “Originality”

“Originality is the art of concealing your sources.”  - Benjamin Franklin

“What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.”  - Dean William R. Inge

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

“About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.”  - Josh Billings

“Imitation, if noble and general, insures the best hope of originality.”  - Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

“Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.”  - Friedrich Nietzsche

“Originality is merely an illusion.”  - M.C. Escher

“Utter originality is, of course, out of the question”  - Ezra Pound

“The secret of all effective originality … is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.”  - Leo Burnett

“Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate.”  - Eric Hoffer

“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

“Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed from one another. The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the prope.”  - Voltaire