Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.
Abraham Lincoln

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C. S. Lewis

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law.
Thomas Paine

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.
Karl Marx

The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.
Karl Marx

Originality is nothing by judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.
Voltaire

Words derive their power from the original word.
Meister Eckhart

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
Frank Lloyd Wright

The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.
Reinhold Niebuhr

Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.
Warren G. Bennis

I stay true to myself and my style, and I am always pushing myself to be aware of that and be original.
Aaliyah

U2 is an original species... there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone.
Bono

We idolized the Beatles, except for those of us who idolized the Rolling Stones, who in those days still had many of their original teeth.
Dave Barry

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
Aldous Huxley

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.
David Ogilvy