"Reality is obtained not by imitation, but by producing the sense of nature."
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Imitation quotes
Imitation
164 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Imitation quotes (page 3 of 9)
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"We love much better those who endeavor to imitate us, than those who strive to equal us. For imitation is a sign of esteem, but competition of envy."
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"The only good imitations are those that poke fun at bad originals."
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"Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble."
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"I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection... and finally, that he would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacifick temper of the mind, which were the characteristicks of the divine Author of our blessed religion ; without an humble imitation of whose example, in these things, we can never hope to be a happy Nation."
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"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."
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"By close inspection... you will discover the manner of handling the artifices of contrast, glazing, and other expedients, by which good colorists have raised the value of their tints, and by which nature has been so happily imitated."
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"My errors are by now natural and incorrigible; but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable."
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"What's the point of being a lesbian if a woman is going to look and act like an imitation man?"
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"As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them"
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"The false is nothing but an imitation of the true."
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"In literature imitations do not imitate."
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"Imitation is the sincerest form of insult."
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"Imitation is criticism."
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"Art is but imitation of nature."
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"Truth does not do as much good in the world as its imitations do harm."
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"The only good copies are those which make us see the absurdity of bad originals."
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"Acquiring knowledge is a form of imitation."
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"An imitator is a man who succeeds in being an imitation."
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"Report of fashions in proud Italy Whose manners still our tardy-apish nation Limps after in base imitation"
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