Originals cost more than imitations.

..if I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur.

Be yourself. An original is worth more than a copy.

As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn't have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything – from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

Do not repeat after me words that you do not understand. Do not merely put on a mask of my ideas, for it will be an illusion and you will thereby deceive yourself.

Acquiring knowledge is a form of imitation.

And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man –whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyze the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.

People are eager to walk in other people's pair of shoes that does not fit them. The result is that, their dreams begin to imitate a tortoise walk and that I guess is already uncomfortable!

Your original self is worth more than your imitation of someone else.

No one want to be an imitation of another

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

When the bad imitate the good, there is no knowing what mischief is intended.

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

No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.

The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate.

Imitation is the sincerest flattery.

We are, in truth, more than half what we are by imitation.

To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

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