The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

It's easier to be original and foolish than original and wise.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

It all began with Adam. He was the first man to tell a joke- or a lie. How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing, nobody had said it before. Adam was not alone in the Garden of Eden, however, and does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the first woman, and Satan, the first consultant.

If you’re going to be original, you are going to be wrong a lot." -- Roger Von Oech, A Whack on the Side of the Head: How to Unlock Your Mind for Innovation

There once was a man who said, "I will be original or I will be nothing." He became both. – Peter Wagner

...interest... is usually recruited by events that differ only a little from what is familiar and therefore are understandable with some effort.... Adults show the keenest interest in ideas that are slightly discrepant from their existing knowledge. The celebrated writers and artists of any era are able to anticipate themes that are not yet, but are about to become, nodes of uncertainty in their society.... The artist who wants acceptance cannot "run too far ahead... of the reader." Over time the mind-heart, like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower, finds a fresh novelty that recruits attention to a theme it can understand with effort and in that process becomes emotionally aroused. That is one reason why the form of psychotherapy that works best changes every twenty to twenty-five years. The curative power of psychoanalytic techniques began to wane when the therapists' secrets became public knowledge. The same fate may be in store for today's favorite psychotherapeutic regimens. Humans have the unfortunate habit of mistaking originality for wisdom because novelty is alerting, and, if understandable, creates an intuition of truth.