“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. Jerome 87
English humorist 1859–1927Related quotes

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

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 56

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.”
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“Of late years… it has been successfully shewn that the human race might have had one origin”
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.