The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.
The original writer is not he who refrains from imitating others, but he who can be imitated by none.
Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
Self-knowledge reveals to the soul that its natural motion is not, if uninterrupted, in a straight line, but circular, as around some inner object, about a center, the point to which it owes its origin.”
My chief virtue (or if you like, defect) has been a tireless lifelong search for an original, individual musical idiom. I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices.
I am more original than no one