Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Originality
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The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
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Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.
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Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.
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Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: 'Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.'