Fran Lebowitz Quotes

There is no original sin. It's all been done before.

No bird has ever uttered note That was not in some first bird's throat; Since Eden's freshness and man's fall No rose has been original.

It is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.

The most original minds borrowed from one another.

Only those with no memory insist on their originality.

People are always talking about originality; but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us; and this goes on to the end. And after all, what can we call our own, except energy, strength, and will? If I could give an account of all that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would be but a small balance in my favor.

Original sin reassures us that our slip was not the first.

all mankind, not excluding Americans, are sinners--miserable sinners, as even no few Bostonians themselves nowadays contritely respond in the liturgy.

My faith reminds me that we all are sinners.

Most everything I've done I've copied from somebody else.

Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest.

The Christian religion teaches me two points-that there is a God whom men can know, and that their nature is so corrupt that they are unworthy of Him.

With the Fall all became abnormal. It is not just that the individual is separated from God by his true moral guilt, but each of us is not what God made us to be. Beyond each of us as individuals, human relationships are not what God meant them to be. And beyond that, nature is abnormal - the whole cause-and-effect significant history is now abnormal. To say it another way: there is much in history now which should not be.

I didn't want to feel like I was mimicking or copying someone else's performance, whether it's subconscious or not.

Original sin is the proclivity to say "my will be done" instead of "thy will be done."

That so called "original sin" does not know any racial discrimination.

There is nothing original; all is reflected light.

As the salt flavors every drop in the Atlantic, so does sin affect every atom of our nature. It is so sadly there, so abundantly there, that if you cannot detect it, you are deceived.

Let the beauty we love do what we do.

You're not going to be able to look like anyone else, no matter how hard you try, unless you're a mimic, then you're not acting, you're just mimicking. You can't go on being John Wayne, that's John Wayne. So you're not going to steal from John Wayne. I'm not going to steal from John Wayne and you're not going to come back and say 'Didn't you get that from the circus?' You know. But he is one of those people who instructs me, whom I look up to - whom I think is one of the masters of his craft that I am so enamoured of.

Human beings can't see anything without wanting to destroy it. That's original sin. And I'm going to destroy it. Death is going to die.

...the fall of man in paradise has always been followed by his expulsion.

Every little boy thinks he invented sin.

The only sin is the sin of being born.

If you expect the worst from a person, you can't ever be disappointed... The pessimist takes a sort of gloomy pleasure in observing the depths to which human behaviour can sink. The more sin he sees, the more his belief in Original Sin is confirmed. Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed; that is one of the most abiding of human satisfaction.