Auguste Rodin Quotes

In everything truth surpasses the imitation and copy.

A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.

The true is inimitable, the false untransformable.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great.

Agesilaus being invited once to hear a man who admirably imitated the nightingale, he declined, saying he had heard the nightingale itself.

As nature made every man with a nose and eyes of his own, she gave him a character of his own, too; and yet we, O foolish race! must try our very best to ape some one or two of our neighbors, whose ideas fit us no more than their breeches!

Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character.

That man's best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature's infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.

I am entering into the truth, into nature.

What is not in nature can never be true.

In everything, without doubt, truth has the advantage over imitation.

It is impossible to imitate Voltaire without being Voltaire.

I believe I am looking for rightness. My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation. In nature everything is always right: the structure is right, the proportions are good, the colours fit the forms. If you imitate that in painting, it becomes false.

Every thing is what it is, and not another thing.

Find comfort in the knowledge that no imitator ever comes off as well as the original.

Truth is the nursing mother of genius. No man can be absolutely true to himself, eschewing cant, compromise, servile imitation, and complaisance without becoming original.

It is foolish to try to imitate the skills of others.

As for me, the only stuff I've ever had success with is when I'm trying to be completely original and not thinking about mirroring what else is out there.

He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.

Imitators are but a servile kind of cattle.

Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed; nature never pretends.

Don't impersonate. Innovate.

There's so many people out there who try to imitate what I do but I am the original.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.