Art & Creativity Quote by George Edward Moore

A philosopher giving advice about painting sounds like a category error until you catch the slyness: Moore is smuggling an argument about originality through an almost throwaway insult. The line turns on a double use of “badly.” One “badly” is personal limitation; the other is social conformity. He’s not romanticizing incompetence. He’s distinguishing between honest failure that belongs to you and secondhand failure that belongs to the crowd.

That’s a very early-20th-century anxiety: the rise of mass taste, standardized training, and “schools” of art that churn out competent sameness. Moore, famous for treating clarity as a moral virtue in philosophy, applies a similar ethic here. The real offense isn’t lack of skill; it’s unexamined imitation. Painting “badly like other people” is a small aesthetic sin that hints at a larger intellectual one: borrowing conclusions, moods, and styles as if they were yours. It’s conformity masquerading as participation.

The intent is almost corrective, even consoling. If you’re going to be mediocre, at least be distinctly mediocre; don’t outsource your errors. That’s a bracing rebuke to prestige culture, where the safest way to fail is to fail in approved ways. Moore’s subtext is that authenticity has diagnostic value: your mistakes reveal what you actually see. Copying other people’s mistakes reveals only what you want to be seen doing.

For a philosopher, it’s also a wink at the tyranny of “good taste.” The quote refuses the idea that value comes only from hitting an external standard. It proposes a harsher, cleaner standard: be answerable to your own perception, not the template.