Letter to Sisters at Saint Mary's, 1848.
“If we wish to imitate the physical sciences, we must not imitate them in their contemporary, most developed form; we must imitate them in their historical youth, when their state of development was comparable to our own at the present time. Otherwise we should behave like boys who try to copy the imposing manners of full-grown men without understanding their raison d’être, also without seeing that in development one cannot jump over intermediate and preliminary phases.”
Source: Gestalt Psychology. 1930, p. 32
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Wolfgang Köhler 12
German-American psychologist and phenomenologist 1887–1967Related quotes
Reflections on Various Subjects (1665–1678), VII. On Air and Manner
Context: Few men, nevertheless, can have unison in many matters without being a copy of each other, if each follow his natural turn of mind. But in general a person will not wholly follow it. He loves to imitate. We often imitate the same person without perceiving it, and we neglect our own good qualities for the good qualities of others, which generally do not suit us.
“We must learn how to imitate Cicero from Cicero himself. Let us imitate him as he imitated others.”
in The Erasmus Reader (1990), p. 130.
Ciceronianus (1528)
2.37
History of the Peloponnesian War
Lee Kuan Yew, The Man & His Ideas, 1997
1990s
Source: The Masters and the Path (1925), Ch.3
“Fools talk of imitation and copying, all is imitation.”
Quote of Gainsborough in a Letter to John Henderson, 27th June 1773
1770 - 1788
Address to the Democratic National Convention (July 19, 1988)
“To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.”
D 96
Variant translation: To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)