„Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.“
Oscar Wilde664
Escritor, poeta e dramaturgo britânico de origem irlandesa 1854 - 1900Citações relacionadas
„Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery.“
— Joyce Brothers Joyce Brothers 1927 - 2013
As quoted in Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 469
„Imitation is the sincerest of flattery.“
— Charles Caleb Colton British priest and writer 1780 - 1832
Vol. I; CCXVII
Lacon (1820)
„Goodman: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Kael: I hate it. It is very creepy being imitated.“
— Pauline Kael American film critic 1919 - 2001
Interview with Susan Goodman, Modern Maturity (March/April 1998) http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/modernmaturity.html.
Interviews
„I believe that love--not imitation--is the sincerest form of flattery. Your imitator thinks that you can be duplicated; your lover knows you can't.“
— Marilyn vos Savant US American magazine columnist, author and lecturer 1946
„Imitation is the sincerest form of television.“
— Fred Allen comedian 1894 - 1956
Attributed in Newsweek, 14 January 1980.
„The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.“
— Ralph Waldo Emerson American philosopher, essayist, and poet 1803 - 1882
The Divinity College Address (1838)
Contexto: The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
„Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.“
— Fulton J. Sheen Catholic bishop and television presenter 1895 - 1979
„Insult, not flattery, is the great aphrodisiac.“
— Mignon McLaughlin American journalist 1913 - 1983
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified
„They say survival is Nature’s only form of flattery.“
— David Brin, livro Glory Season
Fonte: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 26 (p. 512)
„Many owe their greatness to their enemies. Flattery is fiercer than hatred, for hatred corrects the faults flattery had disguised.“
— Baltasar Gracián, livro Oráculo Manual e Arte de Prudência
Fabricáronles a muchos su grandeza sus malévolos. Más fiera es la lisonja que el odio, pues remedia éste eficazmente las tachas que aquélla disimula.
Maxim 84 (p. 47)
The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)
„To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.“
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg German scientist, satirist 1742 - 1799
D 96
Variant translation: To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)
„No form of Nature is inferior to Art; for the arts merely imitate natural forms.“
— Marcus Aurelius, livro Meditações
Meditations. xi. 10.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
„We are not imitating Hitler and Mussolini. They are imitating us. They have just discovered what we knew for centuries: that a corporate, collectivist system pays.“
— Toshio Shiratori Japanese politician 1887 - 1949
Quoted in "The American Mercury" - Page 157 - edited by Henry Louis Mencken - 1942.
„You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.“
— Guy De Maupassant French writer 1850 - 1893
"Sundays of a Bourgeois"
Fonte: Les dimanches d'un bourgeois de Paris, et autres aventures parisiennes
„The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.“
— Edith Sitwell British poet 1887 - 1964
The Last Years of a Rebel (1967)
„Mediocrity can talk; but it is for genius to observe.“
— Benjamin Disraeli British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister 1804 - 1881
Isaac D'Israeli, The Curiosities of Literature, "Men of Genius Deficient in Conversation".
Misattributed, Isaac D'Israeli
„For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when quiescent so very much above mediocrity as the difference between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity: in other words that its greatness is that it can be so great.“
— Gerard Manley Hopkins English poet 1844 - 1889
Letter to A.W.M. Baillie (10 September 1864)
Letters, etc
„Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe.“
— Isaac D'Israeli British writer 1766 - 1848
Men of Genius Deficient in Conversation.
Curiosities of Literature (1791–1834)
