“The human mind can no more produce an original thought than a tree can bear an original fruit. As well might one cry for an original note in music as expect an original idea from a human brain.
One wishes our friends, the critics, would grasp this simple truth, and leave off clamoring for the impossible, and being shocked because they do not get it.”
Dreams http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/jjdrm10.txt
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Jerome K. Jerome87
English humorist 1859–1927Related quotes
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"
Letter to J.D. Hooker, 29 March 1863
In The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, volume 11, 1863; Frederick Burkhardt, Duncan Porter, Sheila Ann Dean, Jonathan R. Topham, Sarah Wilmot, editors; Cambridge University Press, September 1999, page 278
Sometimes paraphrased as “One might as well speculate about the origin of matter.”
Other letters, notebooks, journal articles, recollected statements
Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher
Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 56
Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French economist and businessman
Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book I, On Production, Chapter II, p. 65
“The branch might seem like the fruit's origin:
In fact, the branch exist because of the fruit.”
Mathnawi
Teachings of Rumi (1999)
Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist
'Two Essays on Theodore Roethke'
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)
“Of late years… it has been successfully shewn that the human race might have had one origin”
Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 278
Context: Of late years... it has been successfully shewn that the human race might have had one origin, for anything that can be inferred from external peculiarities.