This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Pope Agapet II, aka Pope Agapetus II NULL
When we live habitually with the wicked, we become necessarily either their victim or their disciple; when we associate, on the contrary, with virtuous men, we form ourselves in imitation of their virtues, or, at least, lose every day something of our faults.
Affectation is an awkward and forced Imitation of what should be genuine and easy, wanting the Beauty that accompanies what is natural.
Affectation | Beauty | Character | Imitation | Beauty |
Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
He only can attain to virtue who knows and imitates God - which knowledge and imitation are the only cause of blessedness... for philosophy is directed to the obtaining of the blessed life, and he who loves God is blessed in the enjoyment of God.
Blessedness | Cause | Enjoyment | God | Imitation | Knowledge | Life | Life | Philosophy | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | God | Blessed |
Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality. Character gives us qualities, but it is our actions - what we do - that we are happy or the reverse.
Action | Character | Happy | Imitation | Life | Life | Qualities | Tragedy | Happiness |
The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate.
Imitation | Impulse | Inferiority | Model | Resentment | Sense |
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
It is not virtue, but a deceptive copy and imitation of virtue, when we are led to the performance of duty by pleasure as its recompense.
Duty | Imitation | Pleasure | Recompense | Virtue | Virtue |
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
Better | Education | Envy | Good | Ignorance | Imitation | Man | Nature | Power | Suicide | Time | Universe |
To be as good as our fathers, we must be better. Imitation is not discipleship. When someone sent a cracked plate to China to have a set made, every piece in the new set had a crack in it.
Leaving aside genetic surgery applied humans, I foresee that the coming century will place in our hands two other forms of biological technology which are less dangerous but still revolutionary enough to transform the conditions of our existence. I count these new technologies as powerful allies in the attack on Bernal's three enemies [the world, the flesh and the devil]. I give them the names 'biological engineering' and 'self-reproducing machinery'. Biological engineering means the artificial synthesis of living organisms designed to fulfil human purposes. Self-reproducing machinery means the imitation of the function and reproduction of a living organism with non-living materials, a computer-program imitating the function of DNA and a miniature factory imitating the functions of protein molecules. After we have attained a complete understanding of the principles of organization and development of a simple multicellular organism, both of these avenues of technological exploitation should be open to us.
Enough | Imitation | Means | Organization | Principles | Technology | Understanding | Will |
For the total development of the human being, solitude as a means of cultivating sensitivity becomes a necessity. One has to know what it means to be alone, what it is to meditate, what it is to die; and the implications of solitude, of meditation, of death, can be known only by seeking them out. These implications cannot be taught, they must be learnt. One can indicate, but learning by what is indicated is not the experiencing of solitude or meditation. To experience what is solitude and what is meditation, one must be in in a state of inquiry; only a mind that is in a state of inquiry is capable of learning. But when inquiry is suppressed by previous knowledge, or by the authority and experience of another, then learning becomes mere imitation, and imitation causes a human being to repeat what is learnt without experiencing it.
Authority | Experience | Imitation | Inquiry | Learning | Means | Mind | Solitude |
Art is not an imitation nor an ethnological curiosity staged for tourists. Only when an artist realizes perfectly which is his right and proper function in the social body, and sees with his own eyes, feels with his own heart and thinks with his own mind, will appear a new art on the American continent, the creation of a new race.
I hardly know so true a mark of a little mind as the servile imitation of others.
Marva Collins, born Marva Delores Nettles
Trust yourself. Think for yourself. Act for yourself. Speak for yourself. Be yourself. Imitation is suicide.
Style is not created through servile imitation of the masters; it proceed from the artist's own particular way of feeling and expressing himself.
Man, as he is, is not a genuine article. He is an imitation of something, and a very bad imitation.