The Quotes canon
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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Alain de Botton1 quote
Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way - towards a busy street or terminal - before they run out of their burrows. — Alain de Botton · 2010Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi1 quote
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. — Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi · 1962Alexander Fleming1 quote
It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to the enterprise, thought, and perception of an individual. — Alexander Fleming · 1951Fran Lebowitz1 quote
Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not possibly have met. — Fran Lebowitz · 1981Francis Ford Coppola1 quote
An essential element of any art is risk. If you don't take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn't been seen before? — Francis Ford Coppola · 2011Friedrich Nietzsche1 quote
What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. — Friedrich Nietzsche · 1882H.L. Mencken1 quote
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. — H.L. Mencken · 1919Ira Gershwin1 quote
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother
When they said that man could fly;
They told Marconi
Wireless was a phony-
It's the same old cry! — Ira Gershwin · 1937Mark Twain1 quote
What a good thing Adam had—when he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before. — Mark Twain · 1867Michel de Montaigne1 quote
Bees ransack flowers here and there, but then they make honey, which is entirely theirs: it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Similarly a boy will transform and mix his borrowings. — Michel de Montaigne · 1580Pablo Picasso1 quote
Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. — Pablo Picasso · 1956Rachel Whiteread1 quote
Everyone repeats themselves. — Rachel Whiteread · 2012Ralph Waldo Emerson1 quote
Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, all flock to their aid. — Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1838W. Somerset Maugham1 quote
The only way to be new is constantly to change yourself, and the only way to be original is to increase, enlarge, deepen your own personality. — W. Somerset Maugham · 1949