Original Copy Quotes & Sayings

Be yourself, because an original is better than a copy. — Greyson Chance

The President of the Galaxy had arrived. He waited for the applause to die down, then raised his hand in greeting. "Hi," he said. A government spider sidled up to him and attempted to press a copy of his prepared speech into his hands. Pages three to seven of the original version were at the moment floating soggily on the Damogran Sea some five miles out from the bay. Pages one and two had been salvaged by a Damogran Frond Crested Eagle and had already become incorporated into an extraordinary new form of nest which the eagle had invented. — Douglas Adams

By exposing the multiplicity, the facticity, the repetition and stereotype at the heart of every aesthetic gesture, photography deconstructs the possibility of differentiating between the original and the copy. [Photography calls] into question the whole concept of the uniqueness of the art object, the originality of the author, the coherence of the oeuvre within which it was made, and the individuality of so-called self-expression. — Rosalind E. Krauss

[T]he present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original[.] — Ludwig Feuerbach

You become a leader when you decide to be an original and not a copy. — Myles Munroe

When something original works, then everyone wants to copy it. But if you're trying to do something that no one's ever seen before it's frightening. — Chris Carter

What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock Tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all? — Chuck Palahniuk

I just wanted to play tennis. I started because I wanted to pick up another sport and then as I was slowly getting better I wanted to see how far I can go but I always wanted to be myself. I wanted to be original. I didn't want to copy anybody's style. — Jana Novotna

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original. — Jean Cocteau

Changes ... can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe are the prerecordings themselves. The copies can only repeat themselves word for word. A virus is a copy. You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble it - it will reassemble in the same form. — William S. Burroughs

Each of us was meant to be an original, but most of us die merely a copy. Anyone who discovers who God made him or her to be would never want to be anyone else. — Bill Johnson

Keep it simple. Trust your imagination. Discover what is unique about your imagination. Don't simply read a story and copy it.
I go into myself. Then I transcribe what visions I have. If those ideas are original, and you are devoted, you will go far. — Clive Barker

Multiplication is the will of God, but not necessarily duplication. God has made you an original masterpiece, so don't seek to be a carbon copy. — Hope D. Blackwell

But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language. — Pierre Boulle

Recently while browsing in a secondhand bookstore I bought a paperback copy of The Intellectual and the City, but I was unable to read it. When I got home I discovered that the original owner had highlighted the entire book - literally. Every line on every page had been drawn through with a bright green Magic Marker. It was a terrifying example of a mind that had lost all power of discrimination. — Florence King

We Americans love original ideas. But truly, there are already plenty of good ones out there, ours for the taking. If I were too proud to copy the ideas of others, I likely wouldn't have even a fraction of my current success. — Mohnish Pabrai

For one thing, a first edition certainly is the edition nearest the heart of an author, the edition upon which his hopes were laid and his ambitions builded; and particularly is this true when the book in question happens to be an author's first publication. Imagine with what flatterings of the authorical heart, with what ecstatic apprehension, he handled his own copy of the book that day it came to him from the publisher! Is not something of this spirit communicated to the collector who loves his writer and his work? Or does that explanation partake too much of sorcery? Here is the original creation, just as it came first from the presses, with all ist strangenesses and wonder for ist orignal readers, with all ist uncorrected errors and inaccuracies to mark it as the curiosity it is. And, of course, with all those mystic values that accrue and attach to the thing that is rare and hard to find. That is all very sentimental, but it is also very practical, as will appear in due course. — Vincent Starrett

It is only in the CREATION that all the ideas and concepts of the word of God can come together. The Creation speaks a universal language that does not depend on any human speech or language. It is an eternal 'original copy' that all men can read. It cannot be faked or counterfeited. It cannot be lost or changed. It cannot be kept secret. It does not depend on man deciding whether to publish it or not. It publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all the nations, and all the worlds. This natural word of God reveals to us all that man needs to know of God. — Thomas Paine

Be yourself. An original is worth more than a copy. — Suzy Kassem

Megan was able to get me the single most important item in this entire house."
"She got you that new vibrator?"
"Jesus ... "
"Oh, the cookbook, right," he said, remembering.
Megan used to work for the Food Network, and was able to secure me a signed copy of the original Barefoot Contessa cookbook. — Alice Clayton

It's okay to be yourself. An original always worth more than a copy.
- Alif , Velvet di Durham - — Aishah Madadiy

It is, of course, an indispensable part of a scrivener's business to verify the accuracy of his copy, word by word. Where there are two or more scriveners in an office, they assist each other in this examination, one reading from the copy, the other holding the original. It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair. I can readily imagine that to some sanguine temperaments it would be altogether intolerable. For example, I cannot credit that the mettlesome poet Byron would have contentedly sat down with Bartleby to examine a law document of, say five hundred pages, closely written in a crimpy hand. — Herman Melville

The things you experience," she continued, "are written on your cells as memories and patterns, which are reprinted again on the next generation. And even if you never lift a shovel or plant a cabbage, every day of your life something is written upon you. And when you die, the entirety of that written record returns to the earth. All we have on this earth, all we are, is a record. Maybe the only things that persist are----copies of things. The original has long since passed away from this universe, but on and on we copy. I have devoted my miniscule life to the act of copying. — Madeleine Thien

The BBC is very much in thrall to all this techno cross-fertilisation, in much the same way that print journalists are now encouraged to blog. To the point where there is an emerging breed of sub-editors who take perfectly well-written and punctuated original copy and rewrite it so that it resembles a text message written by a 14-year-old under the influence of Bacardi Breezers. — Kathryn Flett

A lot of pop music has come out of people failing to copy their model and accidentally creating something new. The closer you get to your ideal, the less original you sound. — Elvis Costello

[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist. — Jacques Barzun

You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained. — Douglas Hofstadter

A lotta cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the original. — Louis Armstrong

At our theaters we only see feeble copies of the copies that have proceeded them, renounce that slavish routine which keeps your art in its infancy; examine everything relative to the development of talents; be original; form a style for yourselves based on your private studies; if you must copy, imitate nature, it is a noble model and never misleads those who follow it. — Jean-Georges Noverre

Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are -- an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd. — Tristan Tzara

Make genuine love the foundation life is here to enjoy in the most positive ways,not to copy others but to be an original of you. — Marcelle Hinkson

I'd like to be an original, to be myself and not a pale copy of anyone else. — Julie Andrews

It is true that the original of this story is put into new words, and the style of the famous lady we here speak of is a little altered; particularly she is made to tell her own tale in modester words that she told it at first, the copy which came first to hand having been written in language more like one still in Newgate than one grown penitent and humble, as she afterwards pretends to be. — Daniel Defoe

I," I start, and she turns to look at my lips moving, rehearsing for some grand proposal. "I think it'd be good idea if you brought a few books over and left them on my shelf." I'm a writer, and this is as good as it gets. She didn't need a ring, just the ability to borrow a bookmark whenever she needed, or unwritten or unspoken permission to take my copy of Cecil Brown's The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger with the original cover. — Darnell Lamont Walker

12. Historians today rely on classics like Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, Caesar's Gallic War, and Tacitus's Histories. The earliest copies we have for these date from 1,300, 900, and 700 years after the original writing, respectively, and there are eight extant copies of the first, ten of the second, and two of the third. In contrast, the earliest copy of Mark's gospel is dated at AD 130 (a century after the original writing), and there are 5,000 ancient Greek copies, along with nearly 20,000 Latin and other ancient manuscripts. The sheer volume of ancient manuscripts provides sufficient comparison between copies to provide an accurate reproduction of the original text. Ironically, a number of fashionable scholars attracted to the so-called gnostic gospels as an "alternative Christianity" have far fewer manuscripts, and the original writings cannot be dated any earlier than a century after the canonical Gospels. — Michael S. Horton

The present age ... prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence ... for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane. — Ludwig Feuerbach

My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of 'The Violation' by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned an artist I know, Brigid Marlin, to make a copy from a photograph. I never stop looking at this painting and its mysterious and beautiful women. — J.G. Ballard

And yet there are other days, when I'm downtrodden or morose, when I find myself at my desk late at night, unable to sleep, flipping through (of all things) Oscar's dog-eared copy of Watchmen. One of the few things that he took with him on the Final Voyage that we recovered. The original trade. I flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: "A Stronger Loving World." To the only panel he's circled. Oscar - who never defaced a book in his life - circled one panel three times in the same emphatic pen he used to write his last letters home. The panel where Adrian Veidt and Dr. Manhattan are having their last convo. After the mutant brain has destroyed New York City; after Dr. Manhattan has murdered Rorschach; after Veidt's plan has succeded in "saving the world." Veidt says: "I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end." And Manhattan, before fading from our Universe, replies: "In — Junot Diaz

She was herself, the original. Everyone else was just a copy. — Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Nature, who permits no two leaves to be exactly alike, has given a still greater diversity to human minds. Imitation, then, is a double murder; for it deprives both copy and original of their primitive existence. — Madame De Stael

Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique - shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it. — Jaron Lanier

In reality, where everything passes on naturally, the copy follows the original, the image the thing which it represents, the thought its object, but on the supernatural, miraculous ground of theology, the original follows the copy, the thing its own likeness.

"it is strange" says St. Augustine, "But nevertheless true, that this world could not exist if it was not known to God." That means the world is known and thought before it exists; nay it exists only because it was thought of. The existence is a consequence of the knowledge or of the act of thinking, the original a consequence of the copy, the object a consequence of its likeness. — Ludwig Feuerbach

You were not mass-produced like a Toyota. You are an original. Not a copy! You were handcrafted and handmade by God, who took his time to create you, making you "wonderfully complex." You're unique. You're special. You're one of a kind. There is no one else quite like you, dead or alive, in the whole world. Nor will there ever be. — Pedro Okoro

We can all take pictures but not everyone can capture the beauty that's usually hidden in plain view ...
We can all open our mouth to sing but not everyone can melodically touch your soul ...
We can all pick up a pen to write but not everyone can write words in such a way that they leap off of the page for you ...
We can all part our lips to speak but not everyone can speak life into you ...
We can all move our bodies to a beat but not everyone can become one with music, stir emotions and shift energy with dance ...
Point is: WE CAN all do something but Know your gifts, cultivate them and ALWAYS, ALWAYS BE YOURSELF! Then working together becomes effortless. Copies aren't accepted everywhere ... ORIGINALS are eventually required! — Sanjo Jendayi

In a poem, melody, or picture, we are forced with a mystery: quality in the metaphysical sense of the word. How could the difference between an original painting and its copy be explained by means of quantity? The original possesses the quality of beauty and 'every copy is ugly'. The difference does not arise from the fact that something has been added or taken away from the copy in the quantitative sense of the word; it lies in the personal touch between the artist and the work of art. Quality can only be 'in touch' with a personality. — Alija Izetbegovic

Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself ... what they imitate is a phantasmic ideal of heterosexual identity ... gay identities work neither to copy nor emulate heterosexuality, but rather, to expose heterosexuality as an incessant and panicked imitation of its own naturalized idealization. That heterosexuality is always in the act of elaborating itself is evidence that it is perpetually at risk, that it, that it 'knows' it's own possibility of becoming undone — Judith Butler

Copying is an art in itself, demanding the greatest technical ability, especially in watercolour. However well done, the copy invariably lacks that nascent, ineffable, but definite quality, provided by the furious enthusiasm with which an original is created, an essential spontaneity that defies reproduction. — Walter J. Phillips

A fake is a copy, a duplicate, a facsimile of an original. The professional coach is authentic - the real deal. — Michael J. Marx

And then certainly, whatsoever you do - your character, your behaviour - is yours, authentically yours. It has your signature on it. Then you are not a carbon copy, you are original. The Zen people call it finding the original face. — Rajneesh

Always feel as if I were reading to you a carbon copy of myself and you've already seen the original. You seem to hear everything I say a minute in advance. We're unsynchronized." "You call that unsynchronized?" "All right. Too well synchronized. — Ayn Rand

The Dominion in 1983 was first published as a thirty page booklet in 1883 under the pseudonym Ralph Centennius. (The author's real name is unknown.) This edition has been proof-read word-by-word against a copy of the original on microfiche. (Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions no. 00529) In this text, a mixture of American and British spelling can be found. (For example — Ralph Centennius

Pavel Durov only knows how to copy great products like Facebook and 'WhatsApp'; he never had and will never have original ideas. — Jan Koum

How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before — Madeleine Thien

Why settle for being a carbon copy; when you were created to be an original? — James A. Jimason

I've only read a few chapters of this book, Trumpet Blast Warning but it's amazing. All of his statements are backed up by original quotes & references from top politicians, the media, etc, so you can check for yourselves & discover this is not a conspiracy theory about world government, it's all backed by facts! All Christians, especially pastors & prayer groups really should read this book. Many thanks to Jason Carter for sending me a copy! — Jason Carter

Everyday we just copy&paste ourselves from the previous day instead of creating a new blank page and be something different and original. — Marcelo Goianira

Be yourself. An original is always worth more than a copy. — Suzy Kassem

I would browse for half an hour or so in the secondhand bookstores in the neighborhood. Owning my own 'library' was my only materialistic ambition; in fact, trying to decide which two of these thousands of books to buy that week, I would frequently get so excited that by the time the purchase was accomplished I had to make use of the bookseller's toilet facilities. I don't believe that either microbe or laxative has ever affected me so strongly as the discovery that I was all at once the owner of a slightly soiled copy of Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity in the original English edition. — Philip Roth

Be the original, not the copy. — Amit Pandit

Each person is responsible only for his or her own sins. Even the Christian doctrine of 'original sin' does not mean that humans are punished for the sin of the first human pair but, rather, that humans seem inevitably to copy the sin of the first human pair. — David Novak

I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely. — Lee Siegel

Write it down. Not just to remember it, but to forget it in the right way. My notebook are a kind of materialized subconscious, a hard-copy memory and its invisible substrata, following their own rules. More than once I have been surprised to discover that an idea I thought was new and original, something I set down in a notebook yesterday, is already contained in another note from years before. Sometimes the second version repeats the first, almost word for word, across the space of a decade. The earlier version, once brought with clarity to the surface, has been covered over again by layers of yellowing paper. — Ivan Vladislavic

I was created a copy. I want more than anything to be an original. — Heather Hildenbrand

You were born God's original. Try not to become someone's copy. — Marian Wright Edelman

Even Proust - there's a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she's sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so - the whole novel is in some ways about that moment. And the damage is part of the attraction, the painting's blotchy cheeks. Even through a copy Proust was able to re-dream that image, re-shape reality with it, pull something all his own from it into the world. Because - the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times. — Donna Tartt

You were born original don't die a copy — Ben Mikaelsen

All religions worthy of the name are now making great efforts to purify their doctrines and return to their original standpoint, - all except Christianity! You surely know that the nineteenth century Christianity is not the religion taught by Christ. Christ's religion has been changed and corrupted. But Christian clergymen are well aware that if they were to attempt to purify Christianity and bring it back to the religion of Christ, the result would be to reform it out of existence. Christianity stands to-day completely explained. Every step in its development is laid bare and shown to be due to purely natural causes, and it is easy to see how much Christianity adopted from other and older religions. — Virchand Gandhi

On July 6, he gave a speech to newspaper and television executives at the great columned building housing the National Archives and the original copy of the Constitution of the United States. "When I see those columns," he said, "I think of what happened to Greece and Rome." "They lost their will to live," he said. "They became subject to the decadence that destroys civilization. The United States is reaching that period. — Tim Weiner

A blank isn't the same. He remembered holding the book, feeling the history of the leather cover someone had tanned and stretched and cut to fit. The paper that someone had laboriously filled by hand and sewn into the binding. Years, heavy on the pages. Morgan had been reading a copy of it. An original. It felt like the old monk's story was part of his own.
But when he read it in the blank, it was just words, and it had no power to carry him away. — Rachel Caine

you were born an original, don't become a copy. — Anonymous

The best way to be original is to not copy anyone. — Sebastyne Young

You were born an original, don't die a copy — John Mason Brown

Many historians regard him [Offa] as the most powerful Anglo-Saxon king before Alfred the Great. In the 780s he extended his power over most of Southern England. One of the most remarkable extantfrom King Offa's reign is a gold coin that is kept in the British Museum. On one side, it carries the inscription Offa Rex (Offa the King). But, turn it over and you are in for a surprise, for in badly copied Arabic are the words La Illaha Illa Allah ('There is no god but Allah alone'). This coin is a copy of an Abbasid dinarfrom the reign of Al-Mansur, dating to 773, and was most probably used by Anglo-Saxon traders. It would have been known even in Anglo-Saxon England that Islamic gold dinars were the most important coinage in the world at that time and Offa's coin looked enough like the original that it would have been readily accepted abroad. — Jim Al-Khalili

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff's talus on the other side,
And then in the far-distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush--and that was all. — Robert Frost

I feel responsible to make something original as a Japanese artist. There are lots of singers and guitarists, but I feel that on stage it's meaningless to copy something someone has done before. — Miyavi

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. — Ludwig Feuerbach

REPLICA, n. A reproduction of a work of art, by the artist that made the original. It is so called to distinguish it from a "copy," which is made by another artist. When the two are mae with equal skill the replica is the more valuable, for it is suppose — Ambrose Bierce

The hills and valleys of Heaven will be to those you now experience not as a copy is to an original, nor as the substitute is to the genuine article, but as the flower to the root, or the diamond to the coal. — C.S. Lewis