Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Authors from whom others steal should not complain, but rejoice. Where there is no game there are no poachers.

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

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?

For years, I was watching other people have so much fun playing out their version of authorship, like Louis C.K. and Larry David. As I watched them do their thing, I began to pine for the days when I had a lot less expected of me and, often, a lot more creative freedom. The courage that those guys have is always captivating to me.

You get your inspiration - suggestions - wherever you have to, even from your mother.

I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.

As I've matured as a songwriter, I realize that if it's out there, it's mine.

You find a lot of ideas from my shows in adverts now. I find it a compliment.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

The most original minds borrowed from one another.

The Great don't innovate, they fertilize seeds planted by lackeys, they leave to others the inhaling of the flowers whose roots they've manured. A deceptive memory may be the key to their originality.

To admire on principle is the only way to imitate without loss of originality.

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 do not know who sings my songs / Before they are sung by me.

Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.

That’s why I hate to take credit for the songs I’ve written. I feel that somewhere, someplace, it’s been done and I’m just a courier bringing it into the world.

For me, it feels like my ideas are more specific to random thoughts or single ideas I might have, as opposed to being influenced by a general perception of absurdity.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

Even luxuries are arranged according to ideas and ideals, to make them reflect as much of thought-life as possible - and this is Art.

Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.

Nobody needs a movie to give them an idea.

The actual and valuable material of all human utterances —is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before.