The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

The heroes of the present will retreat to the imitation they are anyhow.
Charles Olson

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
Theodor Adorno

The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and all their external senses are remarkably acute.
Samuel George Morton

The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.
Orhan Pamuk

The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.
Israel Zangwill

The properties which differentiate living matter from any kind of inorganic imitation may be instinctively felt, but can hardly be formulated without expert knowledge.
Oliver Joseph Lodge

The reason is that for many years I have avoided reading anything whatsoever that approaches my own line of country, out of a somewhat fanatical desire to avoid the risk of unconscious imitation.
Leslie Charteris

The theologians have recognized that the ideal is the imitation of God. If we be a part of such an organic thing, this thing is God to us, as I am God to the cells that compose me.
Charles Fort

The worst acting is about imitation.
Paul Guilfoyle

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.
J. M. Coetzee

There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.
Judith Butler

To be as good as our fathers we must be better, imitation is not discipleship.
Wendell Phillips

To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.
Marcus Aurelius

Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity.
Bill Griffith

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
John Berger

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

What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.
Hans Hofmann

When I came up, it was all about originality and collective research. There is an awful lot of imitation going on now.
Steve Lacy