Voltaire Quotes

The most original minds borrowed from one another.

I don't believe in originality in art. I think we exist on this earth to inspire each other, through our actions, through our deeds, and through who we are. We're always borrowing.

Most of us don't invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Even when writing your own poems, you need to talk to people; you need to magpie around, getting words and things. I'm very against the celebrity culture that wants to say: 'this is a genius, this is one person who has done something brilliant.' There are always a hundred people in the background who have helped to make it.

I simply share ideas I believe in with people around me.

I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.

Learning from other people is what music is all about.

Don't be afraid to borrow. The great men, the most original, borrowed from everybody.

You need others. Too often people think that being unique means being isolated, and being a great artist means coming up with genius ideas out of nowhere. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Having everyone get exposed to brainstorming, prototyping, thinking about a problem, that's a best practice. One of the things I love seeing is how genius people are. You'll be thinking about some area that needs improving, and then someone just comes in and gives you that little bit of energy. Free online education doesn't solve everything, but you open the window and you build on each other.

If you have a candle, the light won't glow any dimmer if I light yours off of mine.

You share things with people and I think information, and art, and ideas should be shared.

We all borrow and steal and copy from each other, and that's the way I think people get inspired.

Don't listen to me. Listen to yourself ... People often ask me at this age, 'Who am I passing the torch to?' First of all, I'm not giving up my torch, thank you! I'm using my torch to light other people's torches. ... If we each have a torch, there's a lot more light.

If you find something that gets hold of you in the Word, pass it on to somebody that very day.

You know we're constantly taking. We don't make most of the food we eat, we don't grow it, anyway. We wear clothes other people make, we speak a language other people developed, we use a mathematics other people evolved and spent their lives building. I mean we're constantly taking things. It's a wonderful ecstatic feeling to create something and put it into the pool of human experience and knowledge.

Sharing is the essence of teaching. It is, I have come to believe, the essence of civilization...Without it, the imagination is but the echo of the self, trapped in a soundproof chamber, reverberating upon itself until it is spent in exhaustion or futility.

Success creates opportunities for other people.

We have an infinite amount to learn both from nature and from each other.

Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair-all these we never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote from them. What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things; wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the name of Goethe.

I came here to be for all and with all, and what I do today in my solitude will be echoed tomorrow by the multitude. What I say now with one heart will be said tomorrow by thousands of hearts.

Share what you do profusely, because it will be remixed by others into something new, rich and strange.

Here's what is exciting about sharing ideas with others: If you share a new idea with ten people, they get to hear it once and you get to hear it ten times.

It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.