"Believe me, when you understand something you will not copy it. A copy cat is a copy cat because he does not understand. Understanding is love. If you don't understand, you don't love."
--from an address by Frank Lloyd Wright, Florida Southern College, Lakeland, FL, March 3, 1950
I saw this quote on a visit to Florida several years ago, copied it down, and promptly lost it. It was worth enough to me to go a couple of hours out of my way, on my most recent trip down there, to get the quote again. (I have a very understanding spouse.) I have the full text of the speech, which I've finally gotten up:
The quote above is the fifth paragraph. I take no resposibility for the punctuation (which I copied exactly from the speech transcript), nor for Wright's opinions.
Frank Lloyd Wright seems here to be making a point much like Christopher Alexander or Jim Coplien: If you have a good generative pattern, you have something more powerful than a cookie cutter. If you understand something, you won't copy it; you'll copy the essence of what makes it good.
See also Elvis Imitators.
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. (Antoine De Saint Exupery)
-- I hope the translation is OK --- Martine Devos
I've always liked Michaelangelo's comment on copying: "Where I steal, there I leave my knife." I read this as "If you're going to copy, do it better; make the original look pale by comparison." (The quotation's not in Bartlett's or the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, so perhaps it's apocryphal. I still like it.)
Google @2003 knows of www.geocities.com 
Actually it dovetails beautifully with Progress Causes Love.
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