#imitation

The ones that landed near the bathroom are Bad Tolkien imitations or transcripts of a D&D adventure; bad Herbert, Heinlein, and Asimov are below the television; and these on the bed are the ones whose authors I want to hunt down personally and slap. ↗

— Sharyn McCrumb

#fanfiction #imitation #literary-criticism #literary-criticism

But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language. ↗

— Pierre Boulle

#books #imitation #language #theme #writing

A prudent man will always try to follow in the footsteps of great men and imitate those who have been truly outstanding, so that, if he is not quite as skillful as they, at least some of their ability may rub off on him. ↗

— Niccolò Machiavelli

#greatness #imitation #learning #men

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. ↗

— John F. Kennedy

#arrogance #cleanses #concern #corrupts #diversity

In the game of life, we all receive a set of variables and limitations in the field of play. We can either focus on the lack thereof or empower ourselves to create better realities with the pieces we play the game with. ↗

— T.F. Hodge

#effort #empowerment #focus #games #life

When you do an interview with me, you're talking to a cheap imitation of the person that I really am. There's no magic in my words, it's just me talking. ↗

— John Mayer

#cheap #i #imitation #interview #just

Imitation is not inspiration, and inspiration only can give birth to a work of art. The least of man's original emanation is better than the best of borrowed thought. ↗

— Albert Pinkham Ryder

#emanation #imitation #inspiration #art

And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man –whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyze the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation. ↗

— Plato

#deceived #foolish #ignorance #imitation #knowledge

As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself. That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything – from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it. ↗

— Robert M. Pirsig

#grades #imitation #learning #rhetoric #school

I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations. ↗

— Terry Tempest Williams

#self-knowledge #family