Thomas Bailey Aldrich Quotes

I can understand when people copy people of the past and make the future their own.

Copy nature and you infringe on the work of our Lord. Interpret nature and you are an artist.

To create is divine, to reproduce is human.

Traditions are lovely thingsto create traditions, that is, not to live off them.

To me, everything is endless variations on other things. Like waves in the ocean. They continue to turn over on each other, and they're all slightly different. I don't know if originality is possible. Is it even necessary? Because everything is different than what came before, but it's all branches from the same tree. Originality is overrated, but what you do with things is always different.

When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

Tradition can, to be sure, participate in a creation, but it can no longer be creative itself.

In comedy, looking back is more important than looking around at your contemporaries because they are too much influenced by the same time period as you are.

The Lord made Adam, the Lord made Eve, he made 'em both a little bit naive.

Art owes its origin to Nature herself... this beautiful creation, the world, supplied the first model, while the original teacher was that divine intelligence which has not only made us superior to the other animals, but like God Himself, if I may venture to say it.

The future has a lot to do with the past.

It embodied what came before. Illuminated what came after.

Pay attention to them kids, don't let your feelings be hurt because they taking your place. They supposed to. But if you wanna stay around with them, you ain't got to copy 'em. Just get the ones that's real young, too young to even be copying yet, because you know they gonna be the next thing.

I hope we go down in history for being something more than just another famous act that got ripped off.

I am always searching for something different or something fresh, something hasn't been done. But the truth is, at the end of the day, we're all sort of retelling something. We're doing a version of something that's already been done.

You can see things growing up, be inspired by things. Just because they're not around anymore doesn't mean that you can't take those inspirations and bring them to life and bring them to the next generation.

Nothing I'm doing is without its predecessors.

The past is always recycled. I'm just taking what the people I looked up to did and translating it for my generation.

Authenticity is the most important thing. You have to know where it all comes from, study who pioneered it.

This act [creation], as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man. For we--even our poets and musicians and inventors--never, in the ultimate sense make. We only build. We always have materials to build from. All we can know about the act of creation must be derived from what we can gather about the relation of the creatures to their Creator

Only those with no memory insist on their originality.

Adam and Eve derived the fullness of joy and bliss from their contemplation of all the animal creatures.

One painter ought never to imitate the manner of any other; because in that case he cannot be called the child of nature, but the grandchild. It is always best to have recourse to nature, which is replete with such abundance of objects, than to the productions of other masters, who learnt everything from her.

Someone very smart once said to me, "Steal, don't borrow." So if there's anything good in anything anyone else does, it's fair game. I think that everything I've ever done at some point is part of someone else's legacy.

Instinct is like Nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.