Guillaume Apollinaire Quotes

Some of us have great original ideas and some of us depend on adaptations.

Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

Aliens didn't come down to Earth and give us technology. We invented it ourselves. Therefore it can never be alienating; it can only be an expression of our humanity.

Everything has been done. It's not possible to create something completely new, something that has never been seen before. It's only possible to make new combinations, establish new connections between things we usually take for granted.

To create is divine, to reproduce is human.

The creation continues incessantly through the media of man. But man does not create... he discovers.

The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.

You make something from things that have happened and from things that exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, and you make something through your invention that is truer than anything true and alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

We have a duty towards music; namely to invent it. ...Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it. For the act of invention implies the necessity of a lucky find and of achieving realization of this find. What we imagine does not necessarily take on concrete form and may remain in a state of virtuality; whereas invention is not conceivable apart from its actually being worked out.

I can imagine anything except having no imagination.

Being creative is at the heart of being human and of all cultural progress.

Art only begins where Imitation ends.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they're seeing now, what we'll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.

Every creation is, at its root, the struggle between potential form and imitated form.

I set out to show that there exists single creative activity,which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences.It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind.

You can think of creativity as applied imagination.

Creativity exists in the present moment. You can't find it anywhere else.

What one man can invent, another can discover.

Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy

Imitators are but a servile kind of cattle.

Imagination is the primary gift of human consciousness.

I'd so much rather have exciting architecture that causes one to stop, breathe, and reflect on the potential of the human mind, the craft, and exploring things.

You don't want it to be a replica or an imitation. You want to create something fresh, original, very unique.

Error has made man so deep, sensitive, and inventive that he has put forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge could not have been capable of it.