Daily Inspiration Quote by Dean Inge

Originality, Inge implies, is less a lightning bolt than a successful disguise. The jab lands because it flips a cherished modern virtue into a procedural hack: you are “original” not when you create from nothing, but when your borrowings escape recognition. That’s not just cynicism for sport. It’s a diagnosis of how culture actually moves - by imitation, recombination, and strategic forgetting of sources.

The line is engineered as a trapdoor. “Originality” arrives with all its Romantic prestige, then Inge replaces the pedestal with a petty crime. The phrase “undetected plagiarism” does two things at once: it punctures artistic self-mythology, and it exposes the social nature of authorship. Credit is not purely moral; it’s institutional. What counts as theft depends on who is watching, what they already know, and whose work is considered worth remembering. Inge’s sting is aimed at the marketplace of reputation as much as at the creator’s ego.

Context matters: Inge lived through a period when mass publishing, formal education, and professionalized criticism were expanding rapidly. More texts meant more echoes; more gatekeepers meant more policing. In that world, “originality” becomes a credential - a way to sort geniuses from hacks - even as the raw materials of thought are increasingly shared, standardized, and circulated.

The subtext isn’t “steal freely.” It’s sharper: the boundary between influence and theft is often drawn after the fact, by power, fashion, and amnesia.