Quotes about imitation
page 2

“All right. I’m not opposed to reality imitating art if it doesn’t get in the way.”

Samuel R. Delany (1942) American author, professor and literary critic

Source: Lines of Power (1968), p. 26

“Art imitates Nature, and Necessity is the Mother of Invention.”

Richard Franck (1858–1938) German composer

Northern Memoirs, written in 1658 and published in 1694 along with another work by Franck, The Contemplative and Practical Angler

Art, Nature

“When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Section 33
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

People

“The result is… that there's no room left in the world for the weird – though plenty for crude, contemptuous, wisecracking, fun-poking imitations of it.”

Fritz Leiber Heroes and Horrors

Source: Heroes and Horrors

World

“Note that this journey is uniquely yours, no one else's. So the path has to be your own. You cannot imitate somebody else's journey and still be true to yourself. Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness in this way?”

Jon Kabat-Zinn (1944) American academic

Way

“An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.”

François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) French writer, politician, diplomat and historian

Source: The Genius of Christianity or the Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion

“When man resolved to imitate walking, he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg. In doing this, he was practicing surrealism without knowing it.”

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) French poet

“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but though his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”

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

Source: 1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance

Education, Suicide, Universe, Time

“The Bhagavad Gita--that ancient Indian Yogic text--says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Life, Perfection

“Okay, now you're starting to scare me," Wes says.
"No, scary is the way people can alter their voices on cue. Like your imitation of that creepy guy who lives at your house."
"You mean my dad?" he laughs.”

Laurie Faria Stolarz (1972) American writer

Source: Deadly Little Lies

People, Way, Guy, Housing

“He was well aware that of the two of three thousand times he had made love (how many times had he made love in his life?) only two or three were really essential and unforgettable. The rest were mere echoes, imitations, repetitions, or reminiscences.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Love, Life, Time

“Nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. The thing that is really hard and really amazing is to give up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

Beauty, Perfection

“I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.”

Carrie Fisher book Postcards from the Edge

Postcards from the Edge (1987)

Life, Art

“A disciple… can never imitate his guide's steps. You have your own way of living your life, of dealing with problems, and of winning. Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself.”

Paulo Coelho book The Pilgrimage

Source: The Pilgrimage

Life, Way, Problem, Learning

“If you can't imitate him, don't copy him.”

Yogi Berra (1925–2015) American baseball player, manager, coach

What Time Is It? You Mean Now?: Advice for Life from the Zennest Master of Them All, Simon and Schuster, 2003, ISBN 0743244532, p. 15
Yogiisms

“I said breathe. Not do a fish-out of-water imitation.”

Karen Marie Moning book Darkfever

Source: Darkfever

Fish, Water

“No matter that we could be beheaded for this,” said Esa. “Heads are overrated.”
“Yes, they are so unfashionable,” said Miri, imitating an Aslandian accent. “This spring, ladies of style are wearing their feathers in their necks.”

Shannon Hale (1974) American fantasy novelist

Source: Palace of Stone

Spring

“Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Learning

“People invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

People

“So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

God, Hope, Understanding, Chance

“Very touching. Do you want me to imitate a violin?”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Variant: Very touching," said a voice from the stairway. "Do you want me to imitate a violin?" - Damon
Source: The Fury

“Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.”

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

Source: Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“Envy is ignorance,
Imitation is Suicide.”

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

Variant: Imitation is suicide.
Source: Self-Reliance

Suicide, Envy

“Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female — whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

“Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.”

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

Life

“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

“In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

God, World

“It's not imitating anything; it has become a better version of itself.”

Brandon Sanderson book The Emperor's Soul

Source: The Emperor's Soul

“Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.”

Samuel Johnson The Rambler

No. 135 (2 July 1751)
Source: The Rambler (1750–1752)

“Frank imitated the voice of Vitellius: 'They're wimps! Back in my day, we died all the time, and we liked it!”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Time

“Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Life, Art, Funny

“A poor original is better than a good imitation.”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) American author and poet

“There's a rebel lying deep in my soul. Anytime anybody tells me the trend is such and such, I go the opposite direction. I hate the idea of trends. I hate imitation; I have a reverence for individuality.”

Clint Eastwood (1930) actor and director from the United States

Source: Wild Open Spaces: Why We Love Westerns

Hate, Soul, Lying, Idea

“I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes.”

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter

People

“Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Section 241
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)
Source: The Passionate State of Mind: And Other Aphorisms

“A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent.”

Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince

Source: The Prince (1513), Ch. 6; translated by Luigi Ricci

Men

“You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.”

John Berryman (1914–1972) American poet

Courage

“At the beginning of all growth, everything imitates.”

Pramoedya Ananta Toer book Bumi Manusia

Source: This Earth of Mankind

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

T.S. Eliot book The Sacred Wood

Source: "Philip Massinger", a biographical essay in The Sacred Wood (1920)

“The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Fear

“I turn and put my lips close to Peeta's and drop my eyelids in imitation… "He offered me sugar and wanted to know all my secrets," I say in my best seductive voice.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Secret

“Imitation is flattery”

Rick Riordan book The Serpent's Shadow

Source: The Serpent's Shadow

“Sometimes an imitation of love can be pretty damn convincing.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Blue-Eyed Devil

Love

“[I] purposely avoided the styles of Raphael and Michaelangelo because I was ambitious of higher distinction than that of a clever imitator.”

Titian (1488–1576) Italian painter

Titian's remark to Francesco Vargas, the Spanish envoy, c. 1545; in Vicus, De studiorum ratione, u. s. p. 109; as quoted by J.A.Y. Crowe & G.B. Cavalcaselle in Titian his life and times - With some account..., publisher John Murray, London, 1877, p. 115
1541-1576

“Art is not imitation but illusion.”

Charles Reade book Christie Johnstone

Source: Christie Johnstone (1853), CHAPTER XII.

Art

“Women must not merely imitate men. Women have more to give than performing any job in society like neutered robots. Those who talk today of rousing the 'consciousness' of women contribute an idea of real importance. It was such a grievous mistake to leave out women. For whence can come love, compassion and understanding if not out of the relations of men and women and of them to their children?”

Dora Russell (1894–1986) author, feminist, socialist campaigner

Source: The Tamarisk Tree (1975), Ch. XIV

Love, Women, Men, Children

“.. and then it remains you to re-create your study, the fragment, into a painting. For remember; these are two [different] things: Nature is the material from which we must take. But don't be fooled by the modern theories, that imitating, copying nature would be 'everything'. The goal, the Art's aim is …. to move..”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek (original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) ..en dan blijft u over, om de studie, het fragment, tot schilderij te herscheppen. Want vergeet niet, dat dat twee [verschillende] dingen zijn: De natuur is de stof, waaruit wij moeten putten. Maar laat u niet door de moderne (Jeltes: hij bedoelde hier waarschijnlijk de Belgische neo-impressionistische) theoriën wijsmaken, dat het navolgen, het copieeren der natuur 'alles' is. Het doel, het streven van de Kunst is.. ..te ontroeren.. Quote of Roelofs, in a letter to his pupil Frans Smissaert, 8 June 1886; as cited in Willem Roelofs (1822—1922), by Mr. H. F. W. Jeltes, in Maandschrift Elsevierweekblad... http://maandschrift.elsevierweekblad.nl/EGM/1922/01/19220101/EGM-19220101-0268/story.pdf, Jan. 1922, p. 222 1880's

Fools, Art, Nature, Study

“So, music does not attempt to imitate Nature's sounds, but it does interpet and embody emotions awakened by Nature through a convention of its own, in a way to be aesthetically pleasing. In some such way, we, taking our hint from Nature, construct decoratively pleasing harmonies and symphonies of color expression of our sentiments.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Quote of Metzinger in 'The Wild Men of Paris', by Gelett Burgess https://monoskop.org/images/f/f3/Burgess_Gelett_1910_The_Wild_Men_of_Paris.pdf, in 'The Architectural Record, Vol XXVII, May 1910, p. 414

Music, Color, Way, Nature

“The leader of the band is tired
And his eyes are growing old
But his blood runs through my instrument
And his song is in my soul --
My life has been a poor attempt
To imitate the man.
I'm just a living legacy
To the leader of the band.”

Dan Fogelberg (1951–2007) singer-songwriter, musician

The Leader of the Band.
Song lyrics, The Innocent Age (1981)

Life, Soul

“You don’t want to be imitating his [Miyazaki] style. You’ve got to create something different, something that he hasn’t done.”

Makoto Shinkai (1973) Japanese anime director and former graphic designer

About Your Name

“Men imitate the gods whom they adore, and to such miserable beings their crimes become their religion.”

Cyprian (200–258) Bishop of Carthage and Christian writer

Letter 1 Letter to Donatus, viii
Letters of Cyprian

Men, God, Religion

“Most Muslims treat the Quran as a document to imitate rather than interpret, suffocating our capacity to think for ourselves.”

Irshad Manji book The Trouble with Islam Today

Source: The Trouble with Islam Today (2005), Ch. 2: Seventy Virgins?

Thinking

“I have in this treatise followed the mathematical method, if not with all strictness, at least imitatively, not in order, by a display of profundity, to procure a better reception for it, but because I believe such a system to be quite capable of it, and that perfection may in time be obtained by a cleverer hand, if stimulated by this sketch, mathematical investigators of nature should find it not unimportant to treat the metaphysical portion, which anyway cannot be got rid of, as a special fundamental department of general physics, and to bring it into unison with the mathematical doctrine of motion.”

Immanuel Kant book Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science

Preface, Tr. Bax (1883)
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786)

Mathematics, Nature, Time, Perfection

“I still yearned then, and probably even more so earlier, for a strong, masculine person on whom I could pattern myself. Somebody I could admire, and imitate, and become close to and learn from. I had sought this, always, in my teachers, and my search had always ended in disappointment. I was attracted emotionally to a position that I could only despise intellectually.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Final Analysis (1990)

Disappointment, Search, Strong, Learning

“My art flatters nobody by imitation, it courts nobody by smoothness, nobody by petitelieness without either fal-de-lal or fiddle-de-dee; how then can I hope to be popular?”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from John Constable's letter to Mr. C.R. Leslie 22 June 1832
1830s

Hope, Art

“I believe that David Letterman is the greatest talk show host that ever hosted a talk show. He'd be the last person to say that and he'd probably be horrified to hear that, but I really do believe that. Anything I do, I feel, is a pale imitation at best of what he does. I just try to do whatever I can not to imitate him, because that is the inclination when you idolize somebody, when you watch the show every night growing up as a kid.”

Jimmy Kimmel (1967) American talk show host and comedian

Julie Hinds (January 29, 2006) "Jimmy Kimmel Loves Detroit - The Late-Night Host Makes Nice As He Brings His Show To The City For Super Bowl Week", Detroit Free Press, p. 1M.

Feeling, Personality, Night

“"I almost wish I were not a painter," observed my companion.
"Why so? one would think at such a time you would most exult in your privilege of being able to imitate the various brilliant and delightful touches of nature."
"No; for instead of delivering myself up to the full enjoyment of them as others do, I am always troubling my head about how I could produce the same effect upon canvas; and as that can never be done, it is more vanity and vexation of spirit."”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. IX : A Snake in the Grass; Helen to Gilbert

Nature, Thinking, Time

““How dare you contradict their opinions! You are only a common servant.”
“Yes, miss,” he said wearily.
“You should be dismissed for being insolent to your betters.”
There was a long pause, and then Baine said, “All the diary entries and dismissals in the world cannot change the truth. Galileo recanted under threat of torture, but that did not make the sun revolve round the earth. If you dismiss me, the vase will still be vulgar, I will still be right, and your taste will still be plebeian, no matter what you write in your diary.”
“Plebeian?” Tossie said, bright pink. “How dare you speak like that to your mistress? You are dismissed.” She pointed imperiously at the house. “Pack your things immediately.”
“Yes, miss,” Baine said. “E pur si muove.”
“What?” Tossie said, bright red with rage. “What did you say?”
“I said, now that finally have dismissed me, I am no longer a member of the servant class and am therefore in a position to speak freely,” he said calmly.
“You are not in a position to speak to me at all,” Tossie said, raising her diary like a weapon. “Leave at once.”
“I dared to speak the truth to you because I felt you were deserving of it,” Baine said seriously. “I had only your best interests at heart, as I have always had. You have been blessed with great riches; not only with the riches of wealth, position, and beauty, but with a bright mind and a keen sensibility, as well as with a fine spirit. And yet you squander those riches on croquet and organdies and trumpery works of art. You have at your disposal a library of the great minds of the past, and yet you read the foolish novels of Charlotte Yonge and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Given the opportunity to study science, you converse with conjurors wearing cheesecloth and phosphorescent paint. Confronted by the glories of Gothic architecture, you admire instead a cheap imitation of it, and confronted by the truth, you stamp your foot like a spoilt child and demand to be told fairy stories.””

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), Chapter 22 (p. 374)

Truth, World, Beauty, Art

“It was Plato who determined once and for all the cultural meaning of imitation, but this meaning is truncated, torn from the essential dimension of acquisitive behavior, which is also the dimension of conflict. If the behavior of certain higher animals, particularly the apes, seems to foreshadow human behavior, it does so almost exclusively, perhaps, because the role of acquisitive mimesis is so important in their behavior, although it is not as central as it is for the human being. If one ape observes another reach for an object, it is immediately tempted to imitate the gesture. It also happens that the animal visibly resists the temptation, and if the imitative gesture amuses us by reminding us of human beings, the failure to complete it, that is to say the repression of what already can be nearly defined as a desire, amuses us even more. It makes the animal a sort of brother to us by showing it subject to the same fundamental rule as humanity—that of preventing conflict, which the convergence of two or several avid hands toward one and the same object cannot help but provoke.”

René Girard book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

Source: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), p. 4.

Behavior, Failure, Help, Animals

“It is really time for him to try to let the nicer side of his nature emerge. It is not necessary that every time he rises he should give his famous imitation of a semi-house-trained polecat.”

Norman Tebbit (1931) English politician

Michael Foot in the House of Commons (2 March, 1978). http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=103629 About

Nature, Time, Housing, Training

“We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries. The three or four years' course of lectures, the bachelor who knows some, the master who knows most, the doctor who knows all, are ideas that have come down unimpaired from the Middle Ages. Nowadays no one should end his learning while he lives and these university degrees are preposterous. It is true that we have multiplied universities greatly in the past hundred years, but we seem to have multiplied them altogether too much upon the old pattern.. [A] new university is just another imitation of all the old universities that have ever been. Educationally we are still for all practical purposes in the coach and horse and galley stage.”

H. G. Wells book World Brain

World Brain (1938)

Age, Education, Way, Idea

“That was the great release for me, when I saw… heard… listened to the Mini Moog. It was just this fat sound of the ring modulators, you know (imitating a moog sound). If you take a guitar, it's always the same; you just can make it more "plumm, plumm, plumm, plumm" or you can make "bwang, bwang, bwang, bwang", like Mr. Townshend does, maybe. But if you tune the volumes and the filters and the LFOs you can make millions of sounds out of it. It's incredible, you know.”

Wolfgang Flür (1947) former member of Kraftwerk

Pop i fokus (2001-03-31), SVT2.

“Imitation can acquire pretty much everything but the power which created the thing imitated.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 96

“What's happened recently in Pakistan, India and Kuwait only goes to show that it's futile to imitate Western democracy. They've ended up exactly where they started.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

As quoted in Asadollah Alam (1991), The Shah and I: The Confidential Diary of Iran's Royal Court, 1968-77, page 506
Attributed

Democracy

“The majority of humans solve their issues by relying on dead methods because those majorities are dead. Attempts and errors, blindly imitations, putting into practice the first idea that comes to mind, reactions based on conditioning and dealing with problems in a linear pattern or by using fragile methods are some instances. Most of the people are not aware that these dead methods will end up to dead results.”

Elia M. Ramollah (1973) founder and leader of the El Yasin Community

The Great Master of Thought (Amen- Vol.3), Observing management

People, Error, Idea, Problem

“True Genius, like Armida’s wand,
Can raise the spring from barren land.
While all the art of Imitation,
Is pilf’ring from the first creation.”

Robert Lloyd (poet) (1733–1764) English poet and satirist

‘Shakespeare’ (1762)

Art, Spring

“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

“People still, old people, insist on picking up the phone and saying their home number, why are you doing that? What a complete waste of time. [imitating old person] "020767944!" [exasperated person on other end] "I know that, I've just dialled it! It's the last thing I did on earth was dial those numbers. Do you open the front door and say your address? It's the same principle."”

Michael McIntyre (1976) British comedian

Live at the Apollo (November 26, 2007)

People, Home, Time, Personality

“In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.”

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher

Source: Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1967), p. 23

God, Time

“In general, just as painters in working from models constantly gaze at their exemplar and thus strive to transfer the expression of the original to their own artistry, so too he who is anxious to make himself perfect in all the kinds of virtue must gaze upon the lives of the saints as upon statues, so to speak, that move and act, and must make their excellence his own by imitation.”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

vol. 1, p. 17
Letters

Perfection

“If the object of all human investigation were but to produce in cognition a reflection of the world as it exists, of what value would be all its labor and pains, which could result only in vain repetition, in an imitation within the soul of that which exists without it?”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 365

Pain, World, Soul

“In any case there is an intense modern interest in machines that imitate life. The great difference between magic and the scientific imitation of life is that where the former is content to copy external appearance, the latter is concerned more with performance and behavior.”

William Grey Walter (1910–1977) American-born British neuroscientist and roboticist

Source: An imitation of life (1950), p. 42.

Life, Behavior, Appearance

“Huh, guess ah shouldn't huh did it. (imitating Britney's 55-hour husband Jason Allen Alexander) Come on, Mr. Britney. Grammar, grammar.”

Kathy Griffin (1960) American actress and comedian

The D-list (2004)

“A bohemian imitates the manners of the class below him.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"Snapshots" (p. 135)
Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979)

“By imitating the manners and the mode of life of the West, the Muslims are being gradually forced to adopt the Western moral outlook: for the imitation of outward appearance leads, by degrees, to a corresponding assimilation of the world-view responsible for that appearance.”

Muhammad Asad book Islam at the Crossroads

Page. 70.
Islam at the Crossroads (1934)

Life, World, Appearance

“The state of conformity is an imitation of grace.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Great Beast (1947), p. 124
Context: The state of conformity is an imitation of grace. By a strange mystery — which is connected with the power of the social element — a profession can confer on quite ordinary men in their exercise of it, virtues which, if they were extended to all circumstances of life, would make of them heroes or saints.
But the power of the social element makes these virtues natural. Accordingly they need a compensation.

“Portugal converted a portion of India to the Catholic religion with the arms of her soldiers, with the blood of her martyrs, with the miracles of her saints, and with the fires of her Inquisition. Those who were vanquished in this struggle became Christians and Portuguese. England might imitate the example, except as regards force.”

Francisco Luís Gomes (1829–1869) Indo-Portuguese physician, writer, historian, economist, political scientist and MP in the Portuguese parli…

Quoted by Nishitha Desai in Lusotopie 2000, p. 474

Religion

“It is this book ['The Imitation of Christ'] that has helped me lead my life which such serenity and has always left me with a contended heart. I has taught me that men should not puff themselves up with pride, whether they are emperors, adding this or that province tot heir empires, or painters who gain a reputation.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Quote, recorded by Madame Aviat; as cited in Corot, Gary Tinterow, Michael Pantazzi, Vincent Pomarède - Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (France), National Gallery of Canada, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), 1996, p. 272-73 – quote 69
1860s

Life, Men, Books, Help

“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

Nature, Appearance

“From the day that the impressionists liberated painting, the modern picture set out at once the structure itself on contrasts; instead of submitting to a subject, the painter makes an insertion and uses a subject in the service of purely plastic means.... [the contemporary painter] must prepare himself in order to confer a maximum of plastic effect on means that have not yet been used. He must not become an imitator of the new visual objectivity, but be a sensibility completely subject to the new state of things.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote, 1914, in 'Functions of Painting by Fernand Leger'; p. 14
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1910's, Contemporary Achievements in Painting, 1914

Painting

“It strikes me that mathematical writing is similar to using a language. To be understood you have to follow some grammatical rules. However, in our case, nobody has taken the trouble of writing down the grammar; we get it as a baby does from parents, by imitation of others. Some mathematicians have a good ear; some not (and some prefer the slangy expressions such as 'iff'). That's life.”

Jean-Pierre Serre (1926) French mathematician

Jean-Pierre Serre in letter to David Goss, quoted in: David Goss. " Some Hints on Mathematical Style https://people.math.osu.edu/goss.3/hint.pdf," at people.math.osu.edu, accessed 08.2016

Life, Mathematics, Parent, Baby

“You try so hard to be an American," I said. "why do you do that? Take a look at yourself"…"And all that paint on your face. You look awful--a cheap imitation of an American. You look frowsy. If I were a Mexican I'd knock your head off. You're a disgrace to your people.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

People, Painting

“He [Jesus] claims that not the observance of outer civil or statutory churchly duties but the pure moral disposition of the heart alone can make man well-pleasing to God (Matthew V, 20-48); … that injury done one’s neighbor can be repaired only through satisfaction rendered to the neighbor himself, not through acts of divine worship (V, 24). Thus, he says, does he intend to do full justice to the Jewish law (V, 17); whence it is obvious that not scriptural scholarship but the pure religion of reason must be the law’s interpreter, for taken according to the letter, it allowed the very opposite of all this. Furthermore, he does not leave unnoticed, in his designations of the strait gate and the narrow way, the misconstruction of the law which men allow themselves in order to evade their true moral duty, holding themselves immune through having fulfilled their churchly duty (VII, 13). He further requires of these pure dispositions that they manifest themselves also in works (VII, 16) and, on the other hand, denies the insidious hope of those who imagine that, through invocation and praise of the Supreme Lawgiver in the person of His envoy, they will make up for their lack of good works and ingratiate themselves into favor (VII, 21). Regarding these works he declares that they ought to be performed publicly, as an example for imitation (V, 16), and in a cheerful mood, not as actions extorted from slaves (VI, 16); and that thus, from a small beginning in the sharing and spreading of such dispositions, religion, like a grain of seed in good soil, or a ferment of goodness, would gradually, through its inner power, grow into a kingdom of God (XIII, 31-33).”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, “The Christian religion as a natural religion”
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)

Men, God, Religion, Justice

“First I will make different color tests: I will study the dark – deep blue, deep violet, deep dirty green, etc. Often I see the colors before my eyes. Sometimes I imitate with my lips the deep sounds of the trumpet – then I see various deep mixtures which the word is uncapable od conceiving and which the palette can only feebly reproduce.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote in Kandinsky's letter to Gabriele Münter, 1915; as cited in Schönberg and Kandinsky: An Historic Encounter, by Klaus Kropfinger; edited by Konrad Boehmer; published by Routledge (imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informal company), 2003, p. 16 note 54
1910 - 1915

Color, Study

“The importance of imitation for the development of higher cognition in human beings: We embody ideas before we abstract them out and then represent them in an articulated way. What is the child doing when they play house? They are watching their parent over multiple instantiations, and then abstracting out the spirit called Mother, and that is whatever is mother-like across all those multiple manifestations, and then laying out that pattern internally and manifesting it in an abstract world. It's that you're smart enough to pull out the abstraction, and then embody it. And certainly the child is striving toward an ideal. If children don't engage in that kind of dramatic and pretend play to some tremendous degree, then they don't get properly socialized. It's really a critical element of developing self understanding and of also developing the capability of being with others, because what you do when you're a child, especially around the age of four is: you jointly construct a shared fictional world, and then you act out your joint roles within that shared fictional world. Embodied imitation and dramatic abstraction constituted the ground out of which higher abstract cognition emerged. How else could it be? Clearly we were mostly bodies before we were minds. Clearly. And so we were acting out things way before we understood them.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_GPAl_q2QQ "Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority"

Children, Age, World, Way

“Instead of trying to educate the human race, they should imitate the pedagogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who concentrated their efforts on the education of a single person.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 26

Education, Effort, Personality

“Many young women of twenty-six in these days could face such an ordeal, I suppose. I have observed a sort of imitative hardness about the products of the higher education of women today which would carry them through anything, perhaps. I am not prepared to say it is a bad thing in the conditions of feminine life prevailing at present. Mabel, however, is not like that. She is as unlike that as she is unlike the simpering misses that used to surround me as a child. She has plenty of brains; she is full of character; her mind and her tastes are cultivated; but it is all mixed up' — Mr Cupples waved his hands in a vague gesture — 'with ideals of refinement and reservation and womanly mystery. I fear she is not a child of the age.”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley book Trent's Last Case

Source: Trent's Last Case (1912), Chapter III: "Breakfast"

Life, Women, Age, Education

“An artist who sees that the imitation of natural appearances, however artistic, is not for him – the kind of creative artist who wants to, and has to express his own inner world – sees with envy how naturally and easily such goals can be attained in music, the least material of the arts today. Understandably, he may turn toward it and try to find the same means in his own art. Hence the current search for rhythm in painting, for mathematical abstract construction.... the way colors are set in motion, etc.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

1910 - 1915
Source: On the Spiritual in Art, 1911; as quoted in Schönberg and Kandinsky: An Historic Encounter, by Klaus Kropfinger; edited by Konrad Boehmer; published by Routledge (imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informal company), 2003, p. 15

World, Art, Music, Color

“Beauty in art is truth bathed in an impression received from nature. I am struck upon seeing a certain place. While I strive for a conscientious imitation, I yet never for an instant lose the emotion that has taken hold of me. Reality is one part of art; feeling completes it... Before any site and any object, abandon yourself to your first impression. If you have really been touched, you will convey to others the sincerity of your emotion.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Quote from Corot's 'Notebooks', ca. 1856, as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 241
1850s

Truth, Beauty, Art, Feeling

“The bank mania is one of the most threatening of these imitations. It is raising up a moneyed aristocracy in our country which has already set the government at defiance, and although forced at length to yield a little on this first essay of their strength, their principles are unyielded and unyielding. These have taken deep root in the hearts of that class from which our legislators are drawn, and the sop to Cerberus from fable has become history. Their principles lay hold of the good, their pelf of the bad, and thus those whom the Constitution had placed as guards to its portals, are sophisticated or suborned from their duties.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Josephus B. Stuart (May 10, 1817) ME 15:112; reported in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb (1904), vol. 15, p. 112
Posthumous publications, On financial matters

Money, History, Heart, Country

“It sweetens every bit of work to think that I am doing it in humble, far-off, yet real imitation of Jesus.”

Elizabeth Prentiss (1818–1878) American musician, hymnwriter

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 250.

Thinking

“I saw Larry King and he was interviewing Pam Anderson. And it was really fun because Pam Anderson…remember when Pam Anderson did her hepatitis tour? Remember when she got hepatitis and then she did a press tour about it, because she is very conscious of woman's issues, and she went on Larry King and she's talking about it. Oh, and by the way, she said she got it from Tommy Lee, which, of course, she did. And Tommy Lee said she got it from a door knob. And…I'm sure that's at least what she got from Tommy Lee. I saw Tommy Lee at an award show two weeks before, I got crabs just from looking at him. So, anyway, she's talking a minute and then she had had her boobs reduced, you know, she keeps getting reduced and bigger and stuff. And then, Larry has the balls to say to her (imitating Larry King), "Aren't you afraid of that plastic surgery?"”

Kathy Griffin (1960) American actress and comedian

and, in the meantime, his ears meeting at the back of his neck.
Allegedly (2004)

Way

“Much of what we do as adults is based on this imitative absorption during our childhood years. Frequently we imagine that we are behaving in a particular way because such behaviour accords with some abstract, lofty code of moral principles, when in reality all we are doing is obeying a deeply ingrained and long 'forgotten' set of purely imitative impressions (along with out carefully concealed instinctive urges) that makes it so hard for societies to change their customs and their 'beliefs'. Even when faced with exciting, brilliantly rational new ideas, based on the application of pure, objective intelligence, the community will still cling to its old home-based habits and prejudices. This is the cross we have to bear if we are going to sail through our vital juvenile 'blotting-paper' phase of rapidly mopping up the accumulated experiences of previous generations. We are forced to take the biased opinions along with the valuable facts.”

Desmond Morris book The Naked Ape

(2010), p. 86
The Naked Ape (1967)

Way, Home, Imagination, Intelligence

“Let us assume that we invited an unknown person to a game of cards. If this person answered us, “I don’t play,” we would either interpret this to mean that he did not understand the game, or that he had an aversion to it which arose from economic, ethical, or other reasons. Let us imagine, however, that an honorable man, who was known to possess every possible skill in the game, and who was well versed in its rules and its forbidden tricks, but who could like a game and participate in it only when it was an innocent pastime, were invited into a company of clever swindlers, who were known as good players and to whom he was equal on both scores, to join them in a game. If he said, “I do not play,” we would have to join him in looking the people with whom he was talking straight in the face, and would be able to supplement his words as follows: “I don’t play, that is, with people such as you, who break the rules of the game, and rob it of its pleasure. If you offer to play a game, our mutual agreement, then, is that we recognize the capriciousness of chance as our master; and you call the science of your nimble fingers chance, and I must accept it as such, it I will, or run the risk of insulting you or choose the shame of imitating you.” … The opinion of Socrates can be summarized in these blunt words, when he said to the Sophists, the leaned men of his time, “I know nothing.””

Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) German philosopher

Therefore these words were a thorn in their eyes and a scourge on their backs.
Socratic Memorabilia, J. Flaherty, trans. (Baltimore: 1967), pp. 165-167.

Men, People, Pleasure, Imagination