Jim Henson Quotes

To be perfectly original one should think much and read little, and this is impossible, for one must have read before one has learnt to think.

People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular- and too lazy to think of anything better.

In a society that tries to standardize thinking, individuality is not highly prized.

If you read all the time what other people have done, you will the think the way they thought.

The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.

I think most people don't like others who, without a voice of their own, emulate the other. I certainly don't want anybody just to pick up my thoughts and hand them back to me.

A 'new thinker', when studied closely, is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought.

Never follow the crowd in what you do; the crowd has never produced anything of lasting quality, value or beauty.

Bring individuality into things, do not just be an imitator. To imitate is to miss life.

It is a poor wit who lives by borrowing the words, decisions, mien, inventions and actions of others.

Rather hang thyself than belong to the horde of successful imitators.

My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

Never follow the crowd. Go where it's empty.

Just as no great painting has ever been created by a committee, no great vision has ever emerged from the herd.

Don't borrow someone else's plan. Develop your own philosophy and it will lead you to unique places.

It keeps me moving when I see people doing stuff that I see as "my" direction. I think, "Oh, it's been tainted. Now I've got to do something new." There's nothing worse than working on your own stuff and thinking that someone else is following you along.

Imitation is for shirkers, like-minded-ness for the comfort lovers, unifying for the creators.

Man is an idiot. He doesn't know how to do anything without copying, without imitating, without plagiarizing, without aping. It might even have been that man invented generation by coitus after seeing the grasshopper copulate.

Observe, don't imitate.

Genius may stand on the shoulders of giants, but it stands alone.

If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.

I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative.

Don't try to write to the trend of the moment.

Posterity weaves no garlands for imitators.

Traditionalists often study what is taught, not what there is to create.