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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.
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“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.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

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Source
The Joyful Wisdom
Date
1910
English wording
Thomas Common — Translator; Paul V. Cohn — Poetry renderer; Maude D. Petre — Poetry renderer · from German
Meaning

Meaning of “Originality.—What is originality? To see something which has…”

Originality is framed as noticing and naming what others already encounter but have not yet conceptualized clearly.

Source context

Where does it come from?

The Joyful Wisdom, aphorism 261, “Originality”; Thomas Common translation.

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ArtAttitudeCreativityCuriosityDeepMindPhilosophyThinking Quotes About Reasoning, Reflection & JudgmentThought-Provoking Quotes That Invite ReflectionInnovationPerspective
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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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We hear only the questions to which we are capable of finding an answer.
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“We hear only the questions to which we are capable of finding an answer.”

Friedrich Nietzsche · The Joyful Wisdom · 1910
Meaning & context

The aphorism suggests that inquiry is limited by the conceptual capacities of the person asking, making intellectual growth partly a matter of becoming able to formulate and recognize better questions.

Source details

The Joyful Wisdom, aphorism 196; Thomas Common translation.

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Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.
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“Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.”

William James · Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking · 1907
Meaning & context

James describes theories as tools for moving inquiry and experience forward rather than final intellectual resting places that eliminate the need for further testing or revision.

Source details

Pragmatism, Lecture II, “What Pragmatism Means”; Project Gutenberg #5116. Capitalization has been normalized from the represented all-caps sentence while the wording is otherwise preserved.

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Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work.
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“Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work.”

William James · Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking · 1907
Meaning & context

James presents pragmatism as a method that makes theories answer to practical consequences and experience instead of allowing abstract formulations to remain rigid and self-sufficient.

Source details

Pragmatism, Lecture II, “What Pragmatism Means”; Project Gutenberg #5116. The sentence follows James’s claim that theories become instruments rather than final answers.

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Partial knowledge is more triumphant than complete knowledge; it takes things to be simpler than they are.
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“Partial knowledge is more triumphant than complete knowledge; it takes things to be simpler than they are.”

Friedrich Nietzsche · Human, All-Too-Human · 1909
Meaning & context

The warning is that simplified partial explanations can spread more easily precisely because they remove the complications that fuller understanding would have to preserve.

Source details

Human, All-Too-Human, Part I, aphorism 578, “Partial Knowledge”; Helen Zimmern translation; sentence shortened before the final clause about popularity and persuasion.

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To define is to limit.
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“To define is to limit.”

Oscar Wilde · The Picture of Dorian Gray — 1891 edition · 1891
Voice: Fictional character · Lord Henry Wotton
Meaning & context

Definitions clarify ideas but can also narrow them, especially when a label is treated as the complete reality of a person or experience.

Source details

The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Chapter 17; Lord Henry answers the Duchess of Monmouth’s question “What are you?” with “To define is to limit.”

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