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If there's an original thought out there, I could use one right now.
Sep 24, 2025
Original thoughts can be understood only in virtue of the unoriginal elements which they contain.
I've never had an original thought in my lifeand there's tons of people on the internet happy to tell me just that.
We would have to invent the U.N if we did not have it which is not an original thought.
Only those with no memory insist on their originality.
One original thought is worth a thousand mindless quotings
One Original Thought is worth 1000 Meaningless Quotes.
An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
No original thought still exists. People are original, each one of them. The same ideas that others had before you are waiting for you to bring them back to life in a new way. The part of who you are that is left behind within these old ideas is what makes them original all over again.
Religion disapproves of original thought the way Dracula does sunlight.
One original thought is worth the sum total of human knowledge, because it advances the sum total of human knowledge by that one original thought.
I have thought about Happy Days made into a movie. As far as the original cast not being a part of it, wow, I don't know who could be who!I just don't see it going in that direction. I can see the original cast doing the movie very easily though.
Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.
Some people rely on rumors and gossip because they are devoid of any original thought.
To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
Your brain, Peekay, has two functions; it is a place for original thought, but also it is a reference library. Use it to tell you where to look, and then you will have for yourself all the brains that have ever been
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and held them fast.
I ain't got an original thought in my head. If it ain't got the scent of divinity to it, I ain't interested in it
When we have the same thought again, the line of the original thought is deepened, causing what's called a memory trace. With each repetition the trace goes deeper and deeper, forming and embedding a pattern of thought. When an emotion is tied to this thought pattern, the memory trace grows exponentially stronger.
Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought.
The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations - more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.
An original thought would crack your feeble skull like a thunderbolt, you craven vulture.
They have never affirm'd any thing, concerning the cause, till the trial was past: whereas, to do it before, is a most venomous thing in the making of Sciences: for whoever has fix'd on his Cause, before he has experimented; can hardly avoid fitting his Experiment, and his Observations, to his Own Cause, which he had before imagin'd; rather than the Cause to the Truth of the Experiment itself. Referring to experiments of the Aristotelian mode, whereby a preconceived truth would be illustrated merely to convince people of the validity of the original thought.
There is a distinction between what may be called a problem and what may be considered an exercise. The latter serves to drill a student in some technique or procedure, and requires little if any, original thought... No exercise, then, can always be done with reasonbable dispatch and with a miniumum of creative thinking. In contrast to an exercise, a problem, if it is a good one for its level, should require though on the part of the student.
I would rather be the author of one original thought than conqueror of a hundred battles. Yet moral excellence is so much superior to intellectual, that I ought to esteem one virtue more valuable than a hundred original thoughts.
Before I even put pen to paper, in any sense, I'm like, "What's the coolest MacGuffin you can come up with? What are the last frames of this series?" The secret that's behind this entire thing is to be as evocative, original, thought-provoking and timely.
My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
The majority of business men are not capable of an original thought, simply because they cannot escape the tyranny of reason.
Over the years, whenever I've felt that little twinkle in the hairs on the back of my neck., as I encountered an original thought or observation in a fishing book, I've turned the corner of the page down.
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.
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.
Sometimes I lie awake at night, and wonder if my life would be different if I had to do it over... Then a voice comes to me out of the dark that says, "boy, there's an original thought!
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
There's one difference between me and them: I know I'm not qualified. In my opinion, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't qualified to be governor of California. Ronald Reagan wasn't qualified to be governor, let alone president. I was a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild when he was its president. My duties consisted of attending meetings and voting. The only thing I remember is that Ronnie never had an original thought and that we had to tell him what to say. That's no way to run a union, let along a state or a country.
I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.
Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.
I love hanging out with my friends and family. I really, really, really love articulating original thought. That's probably my core, my biggest buzz. Because then it makes me feel like I know why I was born. Reaching original thought, where I know that I'm perceiving something that only I have seen, and I need to incarnate that. That's it right there.
Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
I had a date with a girl I called the parrot. All she did was repeat everything I said. She never had an original thought of her own. Everything I liked, she liked. Everything I hated, she hated. It was annoying!
War Is A Racket : I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher- ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service
My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.
Objectively good spaces to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studios have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way - towards a busy street or terminal - before they run out of their burrows.
Genius differs from talent not by the amount of original thoughts, but by making the latter fertile and by positioning them properly, in other words, by integrating everything into a whole, whereas talent produces only fragments, no matter how beautiful.
Thought is the original source of all wealth, all success, all material gain, all great discoveries and inventions, and of all achievement.
Hollywood's thinking is very typical. And it's just really predictable too. And I think at Hollywood, these box office movies are flopping. I mean, there hasn't been an original thought coming out of Hollywood since the '80s.