If imitation is the sincerest flattery, what shall we say of complete adoption of work and workers, with an honorable "by your leave" and outspoken praise!

Imitation is the melody of the eye, inflection is the melody of the ear.

Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small, and imitation by the rest of usthese are the sole factors active in human progress.

Nancy had secretly trained Peter so that he was the best swooner of the family, and his comical imitation of Nancy was so mirth-compelling that Mother Carey laughed and declared there was no such thing as talking seriously to children like hers.

Imitation of the Master in all things even to the stigmata, is the characteristic feature of mediaeval Christianity.

This is better English than the nearer version, "Living correctly is necessary for me;" and the exact imitation, "Living is to me correctly," is nonsense.

Such occasional accidental imitations are not things of much importance.

An Imitation of his Faults, or a Compliance, if not Subservience, to his Vices, must be the Measures of your Conduct.

Thus the imitation of the irregular measures of Guarini was a confession of the translator's inability adequately to handle the dramatic verse of his own tongue.

More practical, may we not say, than this imitation of the Florentine arti of the Middle Ages was the Working Men's College, founded in London in the fifties by that other earnest Christian Socialist, F.D. Maurice, in which Ruskin lectured gratuitously, took charge of the drawing classes, and hied off to the country with its members to sketch from nature and otherwise instruct and entertain them.

The imitation is better with three sounds: "Bow wow wow."

According to him the imitation of nature is the imitation of nature's ways.

Imitation and custom are the spring of almost all human action.

Imitation is the whole sum of him, and his vein is but an itch that he has catched of others, and his flame like that of charcoals that were burnt before.

No doubt the imitation of Tasso and Guarini is an important element in the subsequent history of pastoralism in this country, and to trace and define that influence will be not the least important task of the ensuing chapters.

But we conceive that the imitation of such humours, however skilful and amusing, is not an achievement of the highest order; and, as such humours are rare in real life, they ought, we conceive, to be sparingly introduced into works which profess to be pictures of real life.

Imitation is not, however, always a medicine for dulness, nor does it always produce dulness.

If the imitation of French models was an injury to poetry it was a benefit to prose.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

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 Italian Renaissance did produce some such men; the modern German imitation is a grosser and feebler thing, brutality trying to emulate the glitter and flourish of refined cruelty.

Imitation is often a strong incentive to reading, it is part of the craving for grown-upness to many children; they desire to do what their brothers and sisters can do.

"Imitation," as he uses it, is not an apish or a slavish imitation; it is no mere transcribing or copying of phenomena as they pass (he even allows that the poet may "imitate" men as "better than they are"): it is an expressing, in fiction and harmonious speech, intelligible to his fellow-men, of what truth, order, harmony, and "law" the poet's mind has apprehended in the outer Universe.

Here the imitation of childbirth is a piece of homoeopathic or imitative magic designed to facilitate the effect which it simulates.

He is only insisting that imitation in unmetrical language is still poetry; that meter is not the characteristic element of poetic.