Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else. Judy Garland

• self esteem
• imitation

Never follow the crowd in what you do; the crowd has never produced anything of lasting quality, value or beauty. Denis Waitley

• imitation

The worst thing you can do is say to yourself, "I want to be just like somebody else." You have to absorb knowledge from someone else, but ultimately you have to find your own voice. Yo-Yo Ma

• imitation
• uniqueness

If you can't imitate him, don't copy him. Yogi Berra

• funny
• nonsense
• imitation

Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one. You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this. Eleanor Roosevelt

• imitation
• uniqueness

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean. Charlie Munger

• imitation
• uniqueness

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 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 to 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. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• work
• effort
• imitation

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• imitation

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. Max Beerbohm

• associates
• imitation