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But it is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation.
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“But it is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation.”

Herman Melville

Source
Hawthorne and His Mosses
Date
1850
Meaning

Meaning of “But it is better to fail in originality,…”

Melville values an authentic creative attempt above technically successful copying, making independent invention more important than safe imitation.

Source context

Where does it come from?

“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.

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ArtCourage Quotes About Acting Despite FearCreativityFailureShortThought-Provoking Quotes That Invite ReflectionWritingInnovation
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Insist on yourself; never imitate.
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“Insist on yourself; never imitate.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Self-Reliance · 1841
Meaning & context

Originality begins with developing one’s own capacities rather than copying another person’s surface style.

Source details

Self-Reliance; Emerson gives the imperative while arguing for originality, self-trust, and resistance to imitation rather than dependence on another person’s model.

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All art is at once surface and symbol.
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“All art is at once surface and symbol.”

Oscar Wilde · The Picture of Dorian Gray — 1891 edition · 1891
Voice: Authorial / signed preface voice · Oscar Wilde — Preface
Meaning & context

The aphorism resists a simple choice between appearance and hidden meaning: an artwork can operate through both at the same time.

Source details

The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Preface; part of Wilde’s warning about reading beneath artistic surfaces.

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A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing.
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“A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing.”

Alexander Pope · An Essay on Criticism · 1711
Meaning & context

Partial knowledge can create confidence before understanding has become deep enough to recognize its limits.

Source details

An Essay on Criticism; Pope follows the line with the image of drinking deeply from the Pierian spring.

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What is now proved was once only imagined.
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“What is now proved was once only imagined.”

William Blake · The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · 1790
Meaning & context

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.

Source details

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.

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It is imitation, and as such it is lifeless.
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“It is imitation, and as such it is lifeless.”

George Henry Lewes · The Principles of Success in Literature · 1891
Meaning & context

Surface imitation may reproduce another writer’s recognizable manner without reproducing the thought or experience that originally gave that manner vitality.

Source details

The Principles of Success in Literature, chapter on Style, Project Gutenberg #10420; Lewes criticizes attempts to copy the verbal mannerisms of famous writers.

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We shall never learn the affinities of beauty
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“We shall never learn the affinities of beauty”

Robert Louis Stevenson · Essays in the Art of Writing · 1905
Meaning & context

Stevenson treats beauty as deeper than any complete technical explanation, warning that analysis of artistic mechanism does not exhaust why form can move or delight.

Source details

Essays in the Art of Writing, “On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature,” represented by the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition in Project Gutenberg #492. The collection is posthumous; the excerpt concerns literary aesthetics.