copying

When you are gunning to be like other people, you are foolishly repeating their mistakes, and the worst of it all is that you can't even correct yours.

God never uses one approach to the get his job done in the world. Each soul has its own way of being reached. He has put inside of each of us an unique song, that only another heart can hear clearly. To wish you were someone else robs another human being of the special blessings, talents and gifts God meant for you to share.

Copy cats may seem good at what they are doing, but they will never find a spot at the top.

And in an essential way, this was what he was most ashamed of: not his poor understanding of sex, not his traitorous racial tendencies, not his inability to separate himself from his parents or make his own money or behave like an autonomous creature. It was that, when he and his colleagues sat there at night, the group of them burrowed deep into their own ambitious dream-structures, all of them drawing and planning their improbable buildings, he was doing nothing. He had lost the ability to imagine anything. And so every evening, while the others created, he copied: he drew buildings he had seen on his travels, buildings other people had dreamed and constructed, buildings he had lived in or passed through. Again and again, he made what had already been made, not bothering to improve them, just mimicking them. He was twenty-eight; his imagination had deserted him; he was a copyist.It frightened him. JB had his series. Jude had his work, Willem had his. But what if Malcolm never again created anything? He longed for the years when it was enough to simply be in his room with his hand moving over a piece of graph paper, before the years of decisions and identities, when his parents made his choices for him, and the only thing he had to concentrate on was the clean blade stroke of a line, the ruler's perfect knife edge.

There must be a certain amount of imitation, copying, in outward technique, but when there is inward, psychological imitation surely we cease to be creative.

When you have wit of your own, it's a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.

Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.

One of the fundamental causes of the disintegration of society is copying, which is the worship of authority.

People who copy you will always be one step behind.

The only way to efficiently battle evil is to copy enough to know how to counter each argument, yet not enough to believe all the bullshit.

Here's how man thinks: "If no one__ done it, why should I try? It__ a waste of time; but if he__ done it, I can do it better.

Why escape your intended purpose by copying and trying to be someone else? You will discover who you were meant to be only after you have shown confidence being yourself.

Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don't come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.

There really is no sense in pretending to be normal. Just be you because the moment you do, weirder things happen. Crazy comes back into fashion and every woman has to go out and find her some.

Implementing best practice is copying yesterday, innovation is inventing tomorrow.

If you choose to be fearless, then be fearlessly authentic not an imitation of someone you envy.