Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said that "second-rate artists plagiarise, first-rate artists steal". Plagiarising is passing off other peoples’ work as your own: it’s intellectual theft, it’s misrepresentation, it’s dishonest and you will never be allowed in the playpen again once you have been caught at it.
What Wilde meant by stealing is different: he meant that great artists take from the work of others. They take a character, a plot, or idea, a trick, a phrase, a colour, a shape, a technique, any damn thing they can get their hands on that helps them solve a problem in their own work. Visual artists and designers of all stripes sometimes call it "inspiration", but what they mean is that they took someone else’s idea and used it to develop their own ideas. Mathematicians and scientists put this at the core of their practice: they use other people’s results and techniques and give out credits in a footnote or the name of the theorem or algorithm.
Steal, don’t plagiarise. Look at the work of other people and take whatever techniques and ideas from them that you need to get your own work done.
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