Agesilaus the Spartan king was once invited to hear a mimic imitate the nightingale but declined with the comment that he had heard the nightingale itself.
There is only one thing which is generally safe from plagiarism -- self-denial.
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G.k. Chesterton
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
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Anonymous
Above all things -- read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.
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Ngaio Marsh
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.
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T.S. Eliot
Acquiring knowledge is a form of imitation.
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Jiddu Krishnamurti
More Quotes By Plutarch
Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech.
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. “For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire...
Courage consists not in hazarding without fear but being resolutely minded in a just cause.
It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in it's place is a work extremely troublesome.
