Will Gompertz (1965) British journalist
Think Like an Artist (2015)
Will Gompertz (1965) British journalist
Think Like an Artist (2015)
“There is no original truth, only original error.”
Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher
A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)
Howard H. Aiken (1900–1973) pioneer in computing, original conceptual designer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I computer
As quoted in Portraits in Silicon (1987) by Robert Slater
As quoted in A Computer Science Reader : Selections from Abacus (1988) by Eric A. Weiss, p. 404
Variant: Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher
Entry (1967)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician
Pt. 1, Ch. 10
Disturbing the Universe (1979)
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) philosopher, rhetorician, historian and jurist from Italy
The New Science 144 (1744)
“An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.”
Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker
Le Coq et l’Arlequin (1918)
“To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.”
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (30 May 1902); also in Mark Twain : A Life, p. 611
Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician
“Western Civ,” p. 20.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)
Context: Only the search back to the origins of one’s ideas in order to see the real arguments for them, before people became so certain of them that they ceased thinking about them at all, can liberate us. Our study of history has taught us to laugh at the follies of the whole past, the monarchies, oligarchies, theocracies, and aristocracies with the fanaticism for empire or salvation, once taken so seriously. But we have very few tools for seeing ourselves in the same way, as others will see us. Each age always conspires to make its own way of thinking appear to be the only possible or just way, and our age has the least resistance to the triumph of its own way. There is less real presence of respectable alternatives and less knowledge of the titanic intellectual figures who founded our way.
“An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.”
Stephen Fry book The Liar
The Liar (1991)
1990s