Source-backed quotations about originality, invention, experimentation, new methods and ideas, resistance to imitation or rigid custom, and the conditions under which useful novelty can emerge, spread, or fail. Innovation is kept distinct from generic Creativity, Imagination, Progress, Change or Discovery when no novelty, original method, experiment or departure from established practice is central.
“No man ever originates anything.”
This deliberately extreme claim summarizes the Old Man’s thesis that thought is assembled from inherited experience and external influence rather than created from nothing.
What Is Man?, Old Man speaking in the opening dialogue. This collection treats the sentence as a provocative deterministic position inside the dialogue, not as settled psychology.
“Insist on yourself; never imitate.”
Originality begins with developing one’s own capacities rather than copying another person’s surface style.
Self-Reliance; Emerson gives the imperative while arguing for originality, self-trust, and resistance to imitation rather than dependence on another person’s model.
“But improvement is naturally slow.”
The sentence cautions against expecting useful reform to produce immediate visible results, especially when ambitious projects confront ordinary constraints.
The Idler, No. 88; Johnson is discussing a fictional philosophical society whose grand plans meet the slow pace of practical improvement.
“What is now proved was once only imagined.”
Blake’s proverb compresses a recurring imaginative pattern: possibilities can exist first as conceived ideas before later work, discovery or demonstration makes some of them real or provable.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Proverbs of Hell,” represented by Project Gutenberg #45315 at printed page 16. Gutenberg regularizes the line to “imagined”; Blake’s engraved text is often transcribed with historical spelling and punctuation. The proverb is part of Blake’s deliberately paradoxical infernal-wisdom sequence, not a literal claim that every imagined thing will eventually be proved.
“It is imitation, and as such it is lifeless.”
Surface imitation may reproduce another writer’s recognizable manner without reproducing the thought or experience that originally gave that manner vitality.
The Principles of Success in Literature, chapter on Style, Project Gutenberg #10420; Lewes criticizes attempts to copy the verbal mannerisms of famous writers.
“Customs are not to be changed but for better.”
The maxim sets a burden on reform: novelty alone is not enough; a proposed change should be able to show a practical or rational advantage.
The Idler, No. 90; Johnson is discussing gesture and public speaking, not asserting that every inherited custom should remain untouched.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Emerson attacks rigid consistency when it prevents people from revising judgment in the light of new thought.
Essay “Self-Reliance”; Emerson criticizes rigid adherence to past opinions when fresh judgment requires revision.
“We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success.”
Failure can expose what does not work and force closer observation, turning setbacks into information that uncomplicated success may never reveal.
Self-Help, Chapter XI, “Self-Culture—Facilities and Difficulties,” Project Gutenberg #935. The passage follows Charles James Fox’s contrast between early success and perseverance after failure, then leads into examples of discoveries and learning produced through mistakes and failed attempts.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.”
The move to the woods is a deliberate experiment in stripping away distraction and paying closer attention to living.
Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.”
“Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.”
Original thought needs enough freedom to resist social moulds; creativity weakens when unusual minds are compressed into approved patterns.
On Liberty, Chapter III; the sentence appears in Mill’s defense of individuality and the social value of original characters.
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most.”
The thought notices how novelty can feel more threatening than familiar difficulty, but in the novel it belongs to Raskolnikov while he is approaching a contemplated crime, so it is not presented as generic motivational advice.
Crime and Punishment, Part I, Chapter I, printed page 2 / Wikisource scan leaf 34, Constance Garnett translation in the scan-backed 1917 Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction / P. F. Collier & Son edition, cross-checked against Project Gutenberg #2554. Raskolnikov thinks “Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most” while walking toward the pawnbroker during his contemplated “rehearsal”; the line remains morally compromised fictional interior monologue rather than generic motivational advice.
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.”
Change by itself is not improvement; progress requires preserving useful lessons and achievements while moving beyond what no longer works.
The Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense; the sentence follows Santayana’s discussion of memory and historical learning.
“His efforts were long, laborious, and sometimes apparently hopeless.”
Smiles emphasizes the duration and difficulty of John Harrison’s work before success, making perseverance visible as sustained labor rather than instant inspiration.
Men of Invention and Industry, Chapter III, “John Harrison: Inventor of the Marine Chronometer”; Project Gutenberg #725. This is Smiles’s biographical narration, not Harrison speaking in first person.
“But it is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation.”
Melville values an authentic creative attempt above technically successful copying, making independent invention more important than safe imitation.
“Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850), represented in Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces, Project Gutenberg #76513. Melville is arguing for literary originality and an independent American voice; the sentence is about creative imitation, not a universal ranking of every failure above every success.
“whatever school you follow, it must be only to learn method, not to imitate result”
Studying earlier schools should teach method without turning the student into an imitator, preserving space for an artistic response rooted in the maker’s own time and nature.
Lectures on Art, Lecture VII, Project Gutenberg #19164. The surrounding passage explicitly distinguishes learning from past masters from adopting their results as one’s own.
“The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.”
Custom can become an obstacle when conformity is treated as an answer in itself; improvement requires room to question inherited patterns and try better ones.
On Liberty, Chapter III; Mill describes custom as an enduring opponent of the spirit of liberty, progress and improvement.
“Freedom means essentially the part played by thinking—which is personal—in learning.”
Dewey locates a central part of educational freedom in intellectual initiative: observation, invention, foresight and adaptation undertaken by the learner rather than imposed as mere external compliance.
Democracy and Education (1916), Chapter XXII, “The Individual and the World.” Dewey defines the educational sense of freedom through the personal part played by thinking in learning—intellectual initiative, independent observation, invention, foresight and adaptation—while also arguing that this mental freedom requires room for exploration and movement. Verified against Project Gutenberg #852 and the scan-backed Wikisource Chapter XXII transcription. This is historical educational philosophy, not a modern clinical or legal definition of autonomy.
“True wit is nature to advantage dress’d; what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.”
Strong expression often succeeds not by inventing an alien idea but by giving memorable form to something many people already sensed.
Part II of An Essay on Criticism; Pope defines wit through clear expression of recognizable truth.
“He had enormous and poetic admiration, though very little understanding, of all mechanical devices.”
Lewis satirizes Babbitt’s enthusiasm for modern gadgets by separating his emotional reverence for technology from any real understanding of how it works.
Babbitt, Chapter VI, section I, Project Gutenberg #1156. The narrator says Babbitt has ‘enormous and poetic admiration’ but little understanding of mechanical devices while describing his fascination with consumer technology and technical-sounding language. This is satirical fictional characterization inside Lewis's critique of boosterism and middle-class modernity, not a factual judgment about technology users generally.
“At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done.”
New possibilities often move through stages from disbelief to curiosity and finally hope, especially when evidence begins to challenge settled expectations.
The Secret Garden (1911), Chapter XXVII, “In the Garden.” This collection keeps a shortened opening excerpt of the narrator’s longer sentence: strange possibilities move from disbelief to hope, then to demonstrated possibility and eventual accomplishment. It remains narrator commentary inside the novel rather than a scientific law of progress.
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”
Lovelace cautions readers not to attribute independent origination to Babbage’s proposed machine, distinguishing programmed operations from the human knowledge used to specify them.
Ada Lovelace, Note G to her 1843 translation of Luigi Menabrea’s “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.” The claim concerns the proposed Analytical Engine in its historical design context and is not generalized into a factual limit on modern AI systems.
“What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy”
Pater recommends intellectual openness and repeated testing rather than easy conformity, making revision and exposure to new impressions part of an active critical life.
The Renaissance, Conclusion; Project Gutenberg #2398. The sentence names Comte, Hegel and one’s own orthodoxy in its immediate continuation.
“Originality.—What is originality? To see something which has no name as yet, and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face.”
Originality is framed as noticing and naming what others already encounter but have not yet conceptualized clearly.
The Joyful Wisdom, aphorism 261, “Originality”; Thomas Common translation.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Shaw uses paradox to argue that social change requires people who refuse to accept existing conditions as final, even when ordinary prudence recommends accommodation.
‘Maxims for Revolutionists,’ under the heading ‘REASON,’ appended to Man and Superman and represented by Project Gutenberg #26107. Shaw contrasts the ‘reasonable’ man who adapts to the world with the ‘unreasonable’ man who tries to adapt the world to himself, then gives the deliberately provocative conclusion that progress depends on the latter. It is epigrammatic polemic rather than an empirical rule that unreasonable conduct reliably produces progress.
“To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients, by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted.”
Hamilton argues that a wider variety of productive pursuits can encourage enterprise and contribute to national economic activity.
Final Report on the Subject of Manufactures, December 5, 1791, preserved by Founders Online / National Archives. The sentence appears in Hamilton’s argument for diversifying occupations and manufacturing activity. It is eighteenth-century political economy and policy advocacy, not current economic or investment guidance.
Learning and creative quotations often disagree productively about study, experience, imagination, discipline, and the role of mistakes.
Compare what each source thinks knowledge is for. Some lines emphasize reading and teaching; others emphasize practice, doubt, observation, or making something new.
These routes are drawn from the quotations loaded on this page and are meant as starting points, not extra topic labels.
Concise lines for readers who want the core idea without a long passage.
Quotations connected with deeper interpretation, perspective, philosophy, or sustained thought.
Lines connected with action, discipline, effort, habits, work, or perseverance.
Material about failure, adversity, recovery, resilience, or learning from pressure.
Older works represented in the collection, useful for comparing how the topic changes across time.
