Imitation is suicide. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Borrowed wit is the poorest wit. [ Lavater ]
Art is not imitation, but Illusion. [ Charles Reade ]
Imitation is the sincerest flattery. [ Caleb C. Colton ]
Imitation is the sincerest of flattery. [ Colton ]
Emulation and imitation are of twin birth. [ Charles Buxton ]
No man ever yet became great by imitation. [ Johnson ]
Some imitation is involuntary and unconscious. [ Willmott ]
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. [ Voltaire ]
A good imitation is the most perfect originality. [ Voltaire ]
In everything truth surpasses its imitation or copy. [ Cicero ]
Men do nothing excellent but by imitation of nature. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
Imitation forms our manners, our opinions, our very lives. [ John Weiss ]
In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation, is the aim. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Politeness is the expression or imitation of social virtues. [ Duclos ]
Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals. [ Dr. Johnson ]
We are all easily taught to imitate what is base and depraved. [ Juvenal ]
There is a long and wearisome step between admiration and imitation. [ Richter ]
Imitation is born with us, but what we ought to imitate is not easily found. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
I hardly know so true a mark of a little mind as the servile imitation of others. [ Lord Greville ]
Imitation causes us to leave natural ways to enter into artificial ones; it therefore makes slaves. [ Professor Vinet ]
It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught as men take diseases, one of another. [ William Shakespeare ]
Men are so constituted that everybody undertakes what he sees another successful in, whether he has aptitude for it or not. [ Goethe ]
Since a true knowledge of nature gives us pleasure, a lively imitation of it in poetry or painting must produce a much greater. [ Dryden ]
My advice is to consult the lives of other men as we would a looking-glass, and from thence fetch examples for our own imitation. [ Terence ]
No man can have much kindness for him by whom he does not believe himself esteemed, and nothing so evidently proves esteem as imitation. [ Johnson ]
Even a man's exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale. [ Kant ]
He who imitates what is evil always goes beyond the example that is set; on the contrary, he who imitates what is good always falls short. [ Guicciardini ]
It is, indeed, a blessing, when the virtues of noble races are hereditary; and do derive themselves from the imitation of virtuous ancestors. [ Nabb ]
Before Greece, every thing in human literature and art was a rude and imperfect attempt. Since Greece, every thing has been a rude and imperfect imitation. [ James Freeman Clarke ]
By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is the noblest; second, by imitation, which is the easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest. [ Confucius ]
To be as good as our fathers, Me must be better. Imitation is not discipleship. When some one sent a cracked plate to China to have a set made, every piece in the new set had a crack in it. [ Wendell Phillips ]
Nothing is so difficult as the apparent ease of a clear and flowing style; those graces which, from their presumed facility, encourage all to attempt an imitation of them, are usually the most inimitable. [ Colton ]
For imitation is natural to man from his infancy. Man differs from other animals particularly in this, that he is imitative, and acquires his rudiments of knowledge in this way; besides, the delight in it is universal. [ Aristotle ]
When we live habitually with the wicked, we become necessarily either their victim or their disciple; when we associate, on the contrary, with virtuous men, we form ourselves in imitation of their virtues, or, at least, lose every day something of our faults. [ Agapet ]