#originality

Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes. ↗

— Thomas W. Higginson

#fresh #originality #pair #simply

Ice dance should not be seen as a rigid conformist form of figure skating. There is a great deal of freedom and originality to be had. ↗

— Robin Cousins

#dance #deal #figure #figure skating #form

Most people think an artist tries to be original, but originality is the last thing that develops in the artist. ↗

— Lukas Foss

#be original #develops #last #most #original

Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#feel #minds #one thing #originality #the one thing

But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them. ↗

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

#ceased #elsewhere #exist #french #had

No man, proclaimed Donne , is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island ) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes-forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#insulation #islands #isolation #life #originality

Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist. ↗

— Georges Seurat

#character #depends #drawing #each #only

Literature for me… tries to heal the harm done by stories. (How much harm? Most of the atrocities of history have been created by stories, e.g., the Jews killed Jesus.) I follow Sartre that the freedom the author claims for herself must be shared with the reader. So that would mean that literature is stories that put themselves at the disposal of readers who want to heal themselves. Their healing power lies in their honesty, the freshness of their vision, the new and unexpected things they show, the increase in power and responsibility they give the reader. ↗

— Geoff Ryman

#freedom #freshness #healing #honesty #literature

Absurdity and anti—absurdity are the two poles of creative energy. ↗

— Karl Lagerfeld

#absurdity #anti-absurdity #art #bi #bipolar

When your efforts run in the face of conventional wisdom and accepted mastery, persistence can look like madness. If you succeed in the end, this extreme originality reformulates into a new level of mastery, sometimes even genius; if you fail in the end, you remain a madman in the eyes of others, and maybe even yourself. When you are in the midst of the journey…there’s really no way of knowing which one you are.” (p.129) ↗

— Hilary Austen

#conventional-wisdom #effort #extreme-originality #genius #journey