Daily Inspiration Quote by Lukas Foss

Artistic originality rarely arrives like a lightning bolt; Foss frames it as an accident you earn by staying in the room long enough. The quote begins with an almost taboo reassurance: “For years that may mean imitation.” In a culture that fetishizes the prodigy and the “authentic voice,” Foss grants permission to copy, to apprentice, to sound like your heroes. It’s a demystifying move from a working composer who knew that style isn’t self-expression floating in a vacuum; it’s craft learned through proximity.

Then comes the pivot: “one day, it is like a door opening.” The metaphor matters. A door implies a threshold you didn’t even realize was there until you reached it. The “new thought” isn’t summoned by willpower alone; it “comes in,” as if the mind has become hospitable to possibility after years of repetition and constraint. Foss’s subtext is slyly anti-romantic: originality isn’t a purity test. It’s the byproduct of accumulated habits meeting a small act of disobedience.

“Why not try this instead” is the quietest line and the most radical. It’s the sound of permission, not grand ambition. Innovation begins as a modest alternative, a deviation small enough to risk.

And that final twist - “almost in spite of himself” - punctures the ego narrative. Foss suggests the self doesn’t manufacture originality so much as discover it, stumbling into a voice that was being built all along through imitation, failure, and time.