“That man’s best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature’s infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.”

— Lydia Maria Child

1840s, Letters from New York (1843)
Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/67/12267.html,vol. 1, letter 38

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Lydia Maria Child 34

American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist 1802–1880

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Painting and Culture' p. 55
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“The black man should seek to be, and he should be encouraged to be, the best possible black man and not the best possible imitation of a white man.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

Speech delivered in Birmingham, Alabama, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, 27 October 1921, p. 2.
1920s

“The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

The Divinity College Address (1838)

“A painter must not only be of necessity an imitator of the works of nature…but he must be as necessarily an imitator of the works of other painters: this appears more humiliating, but is equally true; and no man can be an artist, whatever he may suppose, upon any other terms.”

Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) English painter, specialising in portraits

Discourse no. 6, delivered on December 10, 1774; vol. 1, p. 150.
Discourses on Art

“There is no nature which is inferior to art, the arts imitate the nature of things.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

XI, 10
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book XI

“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term "Art," I should call it "the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul." The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of "Artist".”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

Marginalia http://www.easylit.com/poe/comtext/prose/margin.shtml (November 1844)

“He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. XLII
Adonais (1821)

“By practice and experience a man can (if the wind be of the right strength) imitate the complete sailing flight of birds by availing himself of the slight upward trend of some winds, by performing circling sweeps, and by allowing the air to carry him.”

Otto Lilienthal (1848–1896) German aviation pioneer

The Romance of Aeronautics (1912)

“What part should nature play in a work of art? Where should the line be drawn? And from the standpoint of practical procedure - should one work directly from nature or merely study and remember it? Too much freedom frightens me, poor imitator that I am, and yet my head is filled with so many images evoked by what I see around me at all times that nature seems insignificant and banal.”

Paul Sérusier (1864–1927) French painter

Quote from a letter to Maurice Dennis, 1889; as quoted by John Rewald in Pierre Bonnard; MoMA - distribution, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1918, p. 14 - note 7

“Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Third Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

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