Quotes on Being an Original

One essential ingredient for being an original in the day of copies is courageous vision. Charles Swindoll

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.  Judy Garland

Pretension almost always overdoes the original, and hence exposes itself. Hosea Ballou

Be yourself. The world worships the original. Ingrid Bergman

There is just one life for each of us: our own. Euripides

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with. Thomas Carlyle

The masses have no habit of self-reliance or original action. Ralph Waldo Emerson

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment. Josh Billings

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards. Arthur Koestler

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good. Friedrich Nietzsche

It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is. Desiderius Erasmus

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished. William Wordsworth

& We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves. François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Learn to... be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not. Henri Frederic Amiel

Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one. You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this. Eleanor Roosevelt

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere. Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We are betrayed by what is false within. George Meredith

The most original of authors are not so because they advance what is new, but more because they know how to say something, as if it had never been said before. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.  André Berthiaume

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. Henry David Thoreau

You were born an original. Don't die a copy. John Mason

There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man first to hope, and then to believe, that Nature has given him something peculiar to himself. Samuel Johnson

Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it. Louis Kronenberger

Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul. Michel de Montaigne

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. e.e. cummings

He who travels in search of something which he has not got, travels away from himself and grows old even in youth among old things. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is life not a hundred times too short for us to stifle ourselves? Friedrich Nietzsche

Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You. Dr. Seuss