A Quote by Voltaire

A good imitation is the most perfect originality

Voltaire

Quote Topics

Good Imitation Most Originality Perfect

Quote Author

Voltaire
French - Writer
November 21, 1694 - May 30, 1778

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

Voltaire

It is altogether an extraordinary growing, swarming, glittering, pushing, chattering, good-natured, cosmopolitan place, and perhaps in some ways the best imitation of Paris that can be found (with a great originality of its own).

Henry James

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

Herman Melville

Imitation, if noble and general, insures the best hope of originality.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

When I came up, it was all about originality and collective research. There is an awful lot of imitation going on now.

Steve Lacy

The good of the governed is the end, and rewards and punishments are the means, of all government. The government of the supreme and all-perfect Mind, over all his intellectual creation, is by proportioning rewards to piety and virtue, and punishments to disobedience and vice. ... The joys of heaven are prepared, and the horrors of hell in a future state, to render the moral government of the universe perfect and complete. Human government is more or less perfect, as it approaches nearer or diverges further from an imitation of this perfect plan of divine and moral government.

John Adams

Religion is not an imitation of Jesus or Mohammed. Even if an imitation is good, it is never genuine. Be not an imitation of Jesus, but be Jesus, You are quite as great as Jesus, Buddha, or anybody else. If we are not ... we must struggle and be. I would not be exactly like Jesus. It is unnecessary that I should be born a Jew.

Swami Vivekananda

Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer-so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible.

Tom Bissell

It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.

Herman Melville

Human government is more or less perfect as it approaches nearer or diverges farther from the imitation of this perfect plan of divine and moral government.

John Adams

The bad teacher imposes his ideas and his methods on his pupils, and such originality as they may have is lost in the second-rate art of imitation.

Stephen Neill

You feel touched by a movie in a good or bad way or you have a strong reaction to something that's totally artificial, to an imitation of life. But that imitation of life that you see on the screen can affect you almost as if it was real.

Gaspar Noe

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

Josh Billings

Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.

Judith Butler

Bad acting, like bad writing, has a remarkable uniformity, whether seen on the French, German, or English stages; it all seems modeled after two or three types, and those the least like types of good acting. The fault generally lies less in the bad imitation of a good model, than in the successful imitation of a bad model.