No man knows himself as an original. [ Washington Allston ]
The way to be original is to be healthy. [ Lowell ]
God be praised, we have still the original. [ Lessing ]
Darkness, thou first great parent of us all.
Thou art our great original! [ Yalden ]
Pride and conceit were the original sin of man. [ Le Sage ]
There is nothing original; all is reflected light. [ Balzac ]
In love, she who gives her portrait promises the original. [ A. Dupuy ]
All thoughtful men are solitary and original in themselves. [ Lowell ]
Enemies carry a report in a quite different form from the original. [ Plautus ]
Those fair ideas to my aid I'll call, and emulate my great original. [ Dryden ]
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. [ O. W. Holmes ]
Pretension almost always overdoes the original, and hence exposes itself. [ Hosea Ballou ]
An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the centuries. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Liberty, like chastity, once lost, can never be regained in its original purity. [ H. W. Shaw ]
Nor, as a faithful translator, should you be careful to render the original word for word. [ Horace ]
We sometimes meet an original gentleman, who, if manners had not existed, would have invented them. [ Emerson ]
Every alphabet now in use may be traced with historical certainty to one original, the Phoenician or Syriac. [ Chatfield ]
Happiness is a sunbeam, which may pass through a thousand bosoms without losing a particle of its original ray. [ Sir P. Sidney ]
Every man is an original and solitary character. None can either understand or feel the book of his own life like himself. [ Cecil ]
There is only one thing better than tradition, and that is the original and eternal life out of which all tradition takes its rise. [ Lowell ]
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. [ Wordsworth ]
Success in business is seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of commonplace capacity. [ Hazlitt ]
The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another. [ Carlyle ]
When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: Yes, he was more original than his originals.
He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them to life. [ Emerson ]
We content ourselves to present to thinking minds the original seeds from whence spring vast fields of new thought, that may be further cultivated, beautified, and enlarged. [ Chevalier Ramsay ]
Surprise is so essential an ingredient of wit that no wit will bear repetition; - at least, the original electrical feeling produced by any piece of wit can never be renewed. [ Sydney Smith ]
It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion. [ Emerson ]
Affability, mildness, tenderness, and a word which I would fain bring back to its original signification of virtue, - I mean good-nature, - are of daily use: they are the bread of mankind and staff of life. [ Dryden ]
I would rather be the author of one original thought than conqueror of a hundred battles. Yet moral excellence is so much superior to intellectual, that I ought to esteem one virtue more valuable than a hundred original thoughts. [ W. B. Clulow ]
High original genius is always ridiculed on its first appearance; most of all by those who have won themselves the highest reputation in working on the established lines. Genius only commands recognition when it has created the taste which is to appreciate it. [ Froude ]
Perhaps that is nearly the perfection of good writing which is original, but whose truth alone prevents the reader from suspecting that it is so; and which effects that for knowledge which the lens effects for the sunbeam, when it condenses its brightness in order to increase its force. [ Colton ]
There is no security in a good disposition if the support of good principles - that is to say, of religion, of Christian faith - be wanting. It may be soured by misfortune, it may be corrupted by wealth, it may be blighted by neediness, it may lose all its original brightness, if destitute of that support. [ Southey ]
Despair makes a despicable figure, and descends from a mean original. 'Tis the offspring of fear, of laziness and impatience; it argues a defect of spirit and resolution, and oftentimes of honesty, too. I would not despair unless I saw misfortune recorded in the book of fate, and signed and sealed by necessity. [ Collier ]