c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Let the systematic theologian spell it out. Let the artists throw out thoughts and slants, maybe even slants no one else has thought of. They should give another view of something familiar to help us learn more about it. They should deal with love, life, good, evil, God, the world and faith. Many of the biblical writers were poets more than they were theologians. Poets and prophets ranted and raved, and storytellers wrote great yarns that all had different slants on God and life and faith. Perhaps the poet's absence from the Church for many centuries has left it deprived of much insight.
— Steve Stockman
Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.
— Eric Hoffer
Symbols,” Langdon said, “in no way confirm the presence of their original creators.
— Dan Brown, Angels & Demons
you cannot teach art—you cannot make a soul
— John Geddes
Everyone worked day and night, Monday through Saturday. Oppenheimer insisted people take Sundays off to rest and recharge. Scientists fished for trout in nearby streams, or climbed mountains and discussed physics while watching the sunrise. "This is how many discoveries were made," one scientist said.
— Steve Sheinkin, Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon
He had entered another imaginative world, one connected to the beginning of his life as a writer, to the Napoleonic world that had been a lifelong metaphor for the power of art, for the empire of his own creation He began to dictate notes for a new novel, "fragments of the book he imagines himself to be writing." As if he were now writing a novel of which his own altered consciousness was the dramatic center, he dictated a vision of himself as Napoleon and his own family as the Imperial Bonapartes....William and Alice he grasped with his regent hand, addressing his 'dear and most esteemed brother and sister.' To them, to whom he had granted countries, he now gave the responsibility of supervising the detailed plans he had created for 'the decoration of certain apartments, here of the Louvre and Tuileries, which you will find addressed in detail to artists and workment who take them in hand.' He was himself the 'imperial e
— Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, A Biography
The world is changing rapidly, and everyone changes along with the world. Discoveries is now becoming rampant; intellectually, technologically,etc, each having its advantage and disadvantage.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
He was humbled by her infinite love toward him - it shone through even in his afterlife.
— H. L. Balcomb
after life has broken you open, perhaps you may create art
— John Geddes
Failure taught him that he could have made the right choice. I could have tried.
— H. L. Balcomb
The flowers' beauty drew her closer to them like a magnetic force. She felt compelled to walk a little faster.
— H. L. Balcomb
...the imagination works not so much through inspiration as through perseverance. One must slog through the false starts, spot the wrong words and hold out for the right ones, and above all, be vigilant about staying on the path of revision, no matter how uncomfortable or even painful the journey might become.
— Kathleen Norris, The Virgin of Bennington
Burn the book. It serves you once.Read the book. Serves you for a lifetime.Lend the book. It serves for generations to come.
— Kowtham Kumar K
The anthology was not a best-seller
—  art as a weapon seldom is.
Never regret losing time on reading good books
— Kowtham Kumar K
I am no longer scared to close my eyes and to imagine.
— Vijay Bagha
It thanked her for the life she breathed into hits being; without her influence, this little being would not have been in the Garden of Glory.
— H. L. Balcomb
The grand scheme of a life, maybe (just maybe), is not about knowing or not knowing, choosing or not choosing. Perhaps what is truly known can’t be described or articulated by creativity or logic, science or art — but perhaps it can be described by the most authentic and meaningful combination of the two: poetry: As Robert Frost wrote, a poem 'begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.'I recommend the following course of action for those who are just beginning their careers or for those like me, who may be reconfiguring midway through: heed the words of Robert Frost. Start with a big, fat lump in your throat, start with a profound sense of wrong, a deep homesickness, or a crazy lovesickness, and run with it.
— Debbie Millman, Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design
I see a creative process as a necessarily thievish undertaking. Dig beneath a beautiful piece of writing, Monsieur Boustouler, and you will find all manner of dishonor. Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.
— Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
If a creative person steals your idea, he’s killing his creative ability, if he steals your art, he’s killing his art, if he makes it available to the world, it won,t create de impact you could have created, because it wasn’t from the right source.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work. The working artist banishes from her world all sources of trouble. She harnesses the urge for trouble and transforms it in her work.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
Society's goal is to make us less foolish. From the cradle to grave the pressure is on: "Be normal!" Our inner fool may be shackled and caged by a world made to suppress it, but Jesus came to free the fool.
— Mark Batterson, In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars
Writers are not just writers, they are creators of worlds, sculptors of the mind, they are architects of language.
— Jamie L. Harding
The value of an artist is more because of his originality than his skill.
— Amit Kalantri
Flair is what makes the difference between artistry and mere competence. Cmdr. William Riker
— Star Trek The Next Generation
A very serious mental disorder is associated with creativity, a disorder that afflicts only the great souls, and its cure is not known, even to the great souls”.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
It takes courage to be creative. Just as soon as you have an idea, you become a minority of one.
— E. Paul Torrance
wear your treasure and you will be Treasured
— Treasure Stitches
Producing works of art doesn't often count as appropriate intellectual work in an arts department: yet the equivalent in a science department, doing physics or chemistry, does. So why is it that in universities writing about novels is thought to be a higher intellectual calling than writing novels; or rather, if writing novels is not thought to be intellectually valid, why is writing about them?
— Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative
An idea is like a spark to creativity, which turns to a wild conflagration of thoughts, burning every ignorance. When the fire burns, the creative power is awake, and comes out to join the ideas in your head to bring out the hidden valuables the world never knew
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Unless social sciences can be as creative as natural science, our new tools are not likely to be of much use to us.
— Edgar Douglas Adrian
It is not commercial success but originality and proof of autonomy which are admired.
— Angela Phillips
Discovery's friend is creativity
— Phillip Gary Smith, HARMONIZING: Keys to Living in the Song of Life
Who cares for Algebra?Who delights in solving math?I only want to live my lifeAlong the creative path.
— Jennifer Niven, The Aqua Net Diaries: Big Hair, Big Dreams, Small Town
The human eye is restricted to see the useen, because there’s a price to be paid to the rulers of this image and if this image is seen by you, you’ll dare not divulge it to others, for others must pay a price
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Appreciate the aesthetic and creativity of the nature and be grateful for being part of it.
— M.F. Moonzajer
The aesthetic construct, and nothing else, has taught us to expose ourselves to a non-enslaving experience of rank differences. The work of art is even allowed to 'tell' us, those who have run away from form, something, because it quite obviously does not embody the intention to confine us. 'La poesie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose' Something that exposes itself and proves itself in this test gains unpresumed authority. In the space of aesthetic simulation, which is at once the emergency space for the success and failure of the artistic construct, the powerless superiority of the works can affect observers who otherwise take pains to ensure that they have no lord, old or new, above them.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested.
— E.M. Forster
Comparison is the enemy to creativity.
— E'yen A. Gardner
Creativity is imagining something that isn't there and making it real.
— Spencer Wells, Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
The proliferation of creative power can transform the world for all of its inhabitants.
— Timothy Simpson, Boredom to Brilliance
So many important New York musicians were gay, one wit dubbed the American Composers League the Homintern.
— Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America since World War II
I don't get writers block. I get writer has too many ideas and doesn't know which one to start next, block.
— Tyler Hojberg
Its funny to see how creativity is used to satiate a misplaced libido. How it shifts from an extension of who you are to a bait of what/how much you can get.
— Nikhil Sharda, Sans Destination
Insanity is coasting through life in a miserable existence when you have a caged lion locked inside and the key to release it.
— Morgan Freeman
Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between 'creators' isn't their imagination - it's how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.
— Cory Doctorow, Pirate Cinema
Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized further adventures Virgil decided to chronicle. Shakespeare didn't invent Hamlet and King Lear; he plucked them from historical and literary sources. Writers weren't the originators of the stories they told; they were just the temporary curators of them. Real creation was something the gods did.All that has changed. Today the way we think of creativity is dominated by Romantic notions of individual genius and originality, and late-capitalist concepts of intellectual property, under which artists are businesspeople whose creations are the commodities they have for sale.
— Lev Grossman
Magic is not just for the entertainment, but to inspire people to be creative enough with their lives.
— Amit Kalantri
How often have the greatest thoughts and ideas come to light during conversations with the family over the evening dinner?
— E.A. Bucchianeri
Life's a maze, you twist and you turn through itThe driest of droughts, maneuvered and I earned through it
— Clipse
The simple everyday experiences become the doorway to new thoughts and inspirations.
— E.A. Bucchianeri
Creativity doesn’t come from glancing quickly at your Twitter feed while in line at Starbucks. It comes from deep thought. It comes from voraciously reading books—long books that require focused attention. It comes from meaningful discourse with other intellectually curious people. It comes from listening and asking good questions.
— Joshua Rogers
Erudition is the crude residue of wilted harvests
—  wit: the meddlesome weed that wilts them.
I say making movies is like eating a sandwich of shit. Sometimes you get more bread, sometimes less bread, but you always get shit." (Guardian interview 2006)
— Guillermo del Toro
Trying to think more outside the box is like taking a picture with a camera, the more you do it, the more you learn about different positions and angles. The more you take pictures, the more you learn that you can change the camera distance range or change the speeds, and different amounts of light let in. Likewise, the camera speed is the same as allowing yourself time for outside ideas and thoughts to flow.
— Wes Adamson
Nothing kills creativity so well as a big dose of negativity.
— Stella Payton
(reporter interviewing Broadway dancer Tommy Tune:) 'Do you think that greats like Fred Astaire possessed some kind of magic?'(pause)'No. Magic possesses them'.
— Tommy Tune, Astaire: The Man, the Dancer
One of the few things I know about writing is this:spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is a signal to spend it now. Something more will arise later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
the battle for our culture must be waged at the level of the imagination.
— Eric Metaxas
Artistry, perhaps, is at its core being able to control change in interesting ways.
— Jeff Ryan
I’ve had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
I suck the words word-dryto me, assimilated orderly at breakeye speedstill hard and hardersofter thenline-lined book-dry‘til not a dropof water-bloodfrom oak and elmand authored menis left to whisper“Read…
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
When I pour a bowl of Uncle Sam’s cereal, I never know if I should stand when I eat, salute it first, or simply hum the Star Spangled Banner between mouthfuls.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
Split your skull—a hatchet works well enough. Take a more delicate instrument—a scalpel, perhaps—and make a hand-sized slit; it doesn’t matter where. Reach in (no glove needed), plunge down to the very bottom, pinch the inside layer of membrane and yank, hard. If it feels like you’ve just turned your brain inside out, you have. Writing is brain surgery, pure and simple.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
When you write by hand, you don't have the excessive freedom of a computer. When I write down something, I have to be serious about it. I have to ask myself, "Is this necessary at this point in the book?
— Pat Conroy
You have to pay for this view (onto which he looks while writing), so our expenses keep us pretty motivated to write. It's a vicious cycle.
— Pat Conroy
Creation, in all its forms, is where I find beauty. If I could travel as far outward as I have inward, I would know with the utmost conviction that distance does not exist.
— L.A. Rosenberg
This piece of earth I billet grows small. Bullets of time dart past, dropping shards of opportunity at my feet. And until the rift that surrounds my decaying body clamps shut—swallows me up like so many remains—I army on, simultaneously ignoring and saving my comrades in the hole.Such is a writer’s life.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
The genius craves inspiration: she craves altered states and fresh perceptions. She will have them either through evolving closer to the divine or through devolving lower into the world. This is how some people with great genius come to die of drug and alcohol addiction: they seek inspiration by intoxication and are thereby ruined.
— Carolyn Elliott, Awaken Your Genius: A Seven-Step Path to Freeing Your Creativity and Manifesting Your Dreams
The role of your genius spirit is to essentially heal, transform, and evolve consciousness.
— Carolyn Elliott, Awaken Your Genius: A Seven-Step Path to Freeing Your Creativity and Manifesting Your Dreams
...“Maybe it’s like this, Max--you know how, when you are working on a long and ordered piece, all sorts of bright and lovely ideas and images intrude. They have no place in what you are writing, and so if you are young, you write them in a notebook for future use. And you never use them because they are sparkling and alive like colored pebbles on a wave-washed shore. It’s impossible not to fill your pockets with them. But when you get home, they are dry and colorless. I’d like to pin down a few while they are still wet.”...'John Steinbeck
— John Steinbeck
Remember that your fans are your lifeblood. See that you know who they are, and give them a reason to follow you. Be sure to thank them, often, for caring enough to support you. They’re responsible for your success just as much as you are.
— Simon Zingerman, We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish
I think if you study--if you learn too much of what others have done, you may tend to take the same direction as everybody else.
— Jim Henson, It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider
I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.
— Neil Gaiman
I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life, the power to create.
— Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
In one of the Upanishads it says, when the glow of a sunset holds you and you say 'Aha,' that is the recognition of the divinity. And when you say 'Aha' to an art object, that is a recognition of divinity. And what divinity is it? It is your divinity, which is the only divinity there is. We are all phenomenal manifestations of a divine will to live, and that will and the consciousness of life is one in all of us, and that is what artwork expresses.
— Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-87
Ever afterward, though the dance of creation change around me in the hall of eternity, I shall be the same.
— Anandamayi Ma
Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird-- that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace--making the complicated simple, awesomely simple--that's creativity.
— Charles Mingus
Entrepreneurship is when an individual retrieves a red hot idea from the creativity furnace without the constraint of the heat of lean resources, and with each persistent blow of the innovation hammer shapes the still malleable idea against the anvil of passion, vision, insight, strategy, and principles to forge a fitting vessel of a creative concern.
— Amah Lambert, Cracking the Stock Market Code: How to Make Money in Shares
The willingness to be a champion for stupid ideas is the key to greater creativity, innovation, fulfillment, inspiration, motivation and success.
— Richie Norton, The Power of Starting Something Stupid: How to Crush Fear, Make Dreams Happen, and Live without Regret
Computers are quiet and clean and totally distracting because the Internet is there, lying in wait for a moment of weakness to pounce on your creativity and progress.
— Arlaina Tibensky, And Then Things Fall Apart
Perhaps the most powerful and appealing aspect of another's words, however, is simply their convenience. Whether distilled in the briefest apophthegm, or spread out across some voluminous tome, the thought is ready-made, the heavy lifting done. It's there to be used like a weapon or tool, and as time wanders on, seemingly leaving us fewer and fewer new things to say, it becomes ever more useful. As technology moves forward, as well, it also becomes much easier. Indeed, in this "information age" where so much is available to so many so quickly that enlightenment nearly verges on light pollution, it can sometimes appear that expression has been reduced to nothing more than a mad race to unearth and claim references. As such, the citation is also there to be donned, like some article of fashion from which we may reap the praise of discriminating taste without ever exerting ourself in the actual toil of manufacture.
— Jasper Siegel Seneschal, Citations: A Brief Anthology
Imagination is the faculty of the mind that God has given us to make the communication of his beauty beautiful.
— John Piper
Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face to face meetings. " There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,"he said."Thats crazy, Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say ' Wow, and soon your cooking up all sorts of ideas." So he had the Pixar building planned to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. " If a building doesn't encourage that, you'll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that's sparked by serendipity,"he said.
— Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
Unnecessary bureaucracy hinders creativity, growth, justice and the attainment of peace.
— Widad Akreyi
While friends are there to motivate us and keep us pleased. Our enemies are there to annoy us, which makes us work harder to beat them.
— Simon Zingerman, We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish
Creativity is not any accumulated knowledge, coming from past to the present. The stage of creation is a spontaneous flash of intelligence, Energy merging with mind, to create a new beginning. Creativity and meditation are similar, as both are expressions of something beyond mind.
— Gian Kumar
Creativity is a fragile, delicate flower,which must be cautiously cared forand protected,from the harsh elementsof "human weather.
— ELLE NICOLAI
This story inspires me to contribute with something unique and exciting for my time.
— Simon Zingerman, We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish
Creativity is at the heart of every stupid idea . . . creativity and stupid are interchangeable . . . because everything inherent to that kind of creativity requires breaking away from the norm, going against the grain, and leaning into risk and fear.
— Richie Norton, The Power of Starting Something Stupid: How to Crush Fear, Make Dreams Happen, and Live without Regret
You are the end of beauty and creativity one must have created so far.
— M.F. Moonzajer, A moment with God ; Poetry
There really is power in numbers. In today’s society one has to understand the true power of word of mouth. It’s true that the new tastemakers are us.
— Simon Zingerman, We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish
Stories of absurd events in life get my creative juices flowing and have so far given birth to some of my best ideas.
— Simon Zingerman, We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish
Creativity's too big a pill
—  the truth's too hard to swallow. Sprinkle sugar in a straight line and we'll all inhale and follow.
You don't have to reinvent the wheel... just steel the hubcaps.
— Michael P. Naughton, Deathryde: Rebel Without a Corpse
You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in...it's actually kind of tragic because you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is. And there were a couple of years where I really struggled with that.
— David Foster Wallace
My life isn't good or bad. It's an incredible series of emotional and mental extremes, with beautiful thunderstorms and stunning sunrises.Some would say this is my artistic temperament. Others would say i am mentally ill or bipolar. I SAY... it's a bit of both and i make the most of them, CREATIVELY.
— Jaeda DeWalt
If everyone waited to become an expert before starting, no one would become an expert. To become an EXPERT, you must have EXPERIENCE. To get EXPERIENCE, you must EXPERIMENT! Stop waiting. Start stuff.
— Richie Norton
My world is about FEELings. Sometimes, these feelings run so deep i fear i will drown.Creatively, it's a dream to be so sensitive. In real life, it's exhausting, as i tread water to keep myself from sinking.
— Jaeda DeWalt
I just needed time alone with my own thoughtsGot treasures in my mind but couldn’t open up my own vault
— Kanye West
People talk-- they sneer at escapism. Well, there are those of us who need it.
— Piers Anthony
Imagination is our inner-child and creativity, its playground.
— Jaeda DeWalt
Art gives those unexpressed parts of ourselves permission to be felt and spoken.
— Jaeda DeWalt
Sanity is transmuting all the insane parts of your brain into a creative outlet.
— Jaeda DeWalt
Nestled in the valley of darkness, in the deepest depths of depression, are the priceless gems of; creativity, intuition and sensitivity. The trick is learning how to navigate the dark, so these precious gems can be unearthed and their beauty beheld.
— Jaeda DeWalt
I would follow in your footsteps if I wasn't so busy making my own.
— Truth Devour, Wantin
A blank cheque kills creativity.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Confessions of a Misfit
My art is largely made up of my pain; re-framed, redesigned and re-purposed. It's a mutually beneficial experience for both the creator and the beholder. Transformative healing is a beautiful process.
— Jaeda DeWalt
The creative process is a love story that never ends. The ideas are like suitors competing for your attention. You may have relationships, with multiple ideas, at once. You may devote yourself completely to one idea, for a awhile, but the affairs will never end. There will always be more ideas to romance and more concepts to develop. And all for that wonderful moment when you get to gaze at the complete creation and hold perfection in your arms, for one blissful moment... before your inner-critic starts tearing it to shreds.
— Jaeda DeWalt
The art of writing is not as solitary as one might think. When it finally dawns on us one day that our task as writers is to share what we know of the human spirit, we suddenly discover that we were never truly alone.
— Hal Zina Bennett, Write from the Heart: Unleashing the Power of Your Creativity
Someday, i dream we will medically address mental illness in a way that helps people WITHOUT completely crippling them, creatively or robbing them of their precious sensitivity. No one wants to live life feeling like they underwent a chemical lobotomy, that is not living. And, "Normal" needs a much broader definition... perhaps we could just replace that word with, "harmonious living.
— Jaeda DeWalt
Art invites us to become explorers and excavators of our vast internal landscapes, discovering new terrain and digging deep into the past to unearth forgotten experiences and emotion.
— Jaeda DeWalt
Today, the world rewards those with creative and intellectual muscles. So, women and skinny men need to shut up and start thinking.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Confessions of a Misfit
You can’t let fear and indecision sink your creativity—they do not easily release their hold.
— Richie Norton, The Power of Starting Something Stupid: How to Crush Fear, Make Dreams Happen, and Live without Regret
Writing keeps death at bay. Every book I write is a triumph over death. ... If we did not know we’d die, we’d wander around and sleep like cats.
— Ray Bradbury
I don't create my images as visual equations to be solved, but rather, i create them as internal landscapes that the viewer can explore. I enjoy sharing the why behind the what, of my creations... but my way, isn't the only way, to experience them. There is no correct way to interpret them. Perception is reality and yours may be different from mine and that's okay.
— Jaeda DeWalt
When I stay in one Place, I can hardly think at all; my body had to be on the move to set my mind going." Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Live life with creative purpose.
— Truth Devour, Wantin
It’s my opinion that only in times of utter depression or lofty peace is it appropriate to be creative.
— Nicholas Trandahl
If you cannot create, then buy a company that can. In particular, the large corporations buy small, personnally owned companies that have made breakthroughs in particular areas. They are buying creativity, though the immediate rush this produces doesn't last long. Once integrated into an administrative atmosphere, the creativity is sucked out of them.(IV - From Managers and Speculators to Growth)
— John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization
You want to create a country with millions of great magicians? Then let the free thinking prevails everywhere. And thus creativity will increase and creativity is the greatest magician in our universe.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
As a society we should try to never inhibit another person's creativity. In people like myself, it's all we have.
— Michael Houbrick
For if u have positive attitude n creativeness u will always see a graveyard as a beautiful garden...
— Sana
Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.
— Walker Evans
Nolan Bushnell, the creator of the Atari video game system, once stated, ‘Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has had an idea, It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it who makes a difference.
— Mark Batterson, Draw the Circle: The 40 Day Prayer Challenge
Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both.
— Alethea Kontis, Enchanted
Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process) — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or established patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creative the person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are potentially present.
— Rollo May
Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.
— Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
When I’ve lost my way or when I am confused about a path to take, I remember that most answers I need I already possess – deep inside. I am naturally creative, resourceful and whole. If I consult my invisible compass, I’ll know what to do.
— Steve Goodier
It is true that all men are created in the image of God, but Christians are supposed to be conscious of that fact, and being conscious of it should recognize the importance of living artistically, aesthetically, and creatively, as creative creatures of the Creator. If we have been created in the image of an Artist, then we should look for expressions of artistry, and be sensitive to beauty, responsive to what has been created for us” (p. 32).
— Edith Schaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking
It's ever so important to believe in what you do, trust your ability to create and show yourself worthy. Never sell yourself short.
— Simon Zingerman, We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish
Those who seize the day become seriously rich.
— Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less
to paraphrase science writer John D. Barrow … we know they are impossible and yet we can imagine them anyway. Our brains, it turns out, are not prisoners of the world we live in; we can fly free! We can, any time we like, create the impossible.
— Robert Krulwich
You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.
— Scott McCloud, Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
Building positive customer experiences will help create passionate customers who will spread your message on their behalf - almost like an evangelist.
— Simon Zingerman, We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish
As an observer of human nature, let's just face the facts: stupid stuff sells, and often the more stupid and silly it is, the better it sells.
— Simon Zingerman, We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish
I am sure that there is no place in the world where your message would not be enhanced by your making the place (whether tiny or large, a hut or a palace) orderly, artistic and beautiful with some form of creativity, some form of ‘art’ (p. 213).
— Edith Schaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking
You know, all poetry may be a cry of generalised love, for this, or that, or the universe - which must be loved in its particularity, not its generality, but for its universal life in every minute particular. I have always supposed it to be a cry of ;unsatisfied love; - and so it may be indeed - for satisfaction may surfeit it and so it may die. I know many poets who write only when in an exalted state of mind which they compare to ;being in love;,when they do not simply state, that they are in love, that they seek love - for this fresh damsel - or that lively young woman - in order to find a fresh metaphor, or a new bright vision of things in themselves. And to tell you the truth, I have always believed I could diagnose this state of ;being in love; which they regard as ;most particular;, as inspired by item, one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue, ;item;, one graceful attitude of body or mind, ;item;, one female history of some twenty-two years from, shall we say 1821-1844 – I have always believed this ;in love; to be of something of the most abstract masking itself under the particular forms of both lover and beloved. And Poet who assumes and informs both.
— A.S. Byatt, Possession
No original thought still exists. People are original, each one of them. The same ideas that others had before you are waiting for you to bring them back to life in a new way. The part of who you are that is left behind within these old ideas is what makes them original all over again.
— Ashly Lorenzana
In the religious myths, the creative will appears personified in God, and man already feels himself guilty when he assumes himself to be like God, that is, to ascribe this will to himself. In the heroic myths on the contrary, man appears as himself, creative and guilt for his suffering and fall is ascribed to God, that is, to his own will. Both are only extreme reaction phenomena of man wavering between his Godlikeness and his nothingness, whose will is awakened to the knowledge of its power and whose consciousness is aroused to terror before it.
— Otto Rank, Truth and Reality
Part of me would just like to relax and have one job that pays me the amount I need to survive. And another part of me wants the creativity that comes out of struggle and frustration and fear. It's a never-ending cycle, which must be how I want it, on some level.
— Ahmir Questlove Thompson, Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove
What we at first deem useless might end up being the next bestseller. It can be the product's novelty, fun factor or sheer stupidity. Whatever the case, just remember there's always room on the market for an original business idea.
— Simon Zingerman, We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish
All art involves conscious discipline. If one is going to paint, do sculpture, design a building or write a book, it will involve discipline in time and energy — or there would never be any production at all to be seen, felt or enjoyed by ourselves or others. To develop ‘Hidden Art’ will also, of course, take time and energy – and the balance of the use of time is a constant individual problem for all of us: what to do, and what to leave undone. One is always having to neglect one thing in order to give precedence to something else. The question is one of priorities” (p. 32).
— Edith Schaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking
The houses looked like something a child might draw, a row of shaky squares with triangles on top. Add a door, add two windows. Think of putting a tree in the front yard, and then decide against it because branches aren't worth the trouble.
— David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Never fear having your ideas stolen. Your creative idea is a image you are painting like a picture on a canvas, they may "steal" your idea, however they cannot steal your paints.
— Sumner Davenport
I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by a very early speech: 'Mama,' said I, 'I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?
— Robert Louis Stevenson
We must not imitate that which we seek to create.
— Georges Braque
Using your talent, hobby or profession in a way that makes you cintribute with something good to this world is truly the way to go.
— Simon Zingerman, We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish
Art isn't life, you know. It if were, the world would go up in flames. It's artifice. By definition.("Talking In The Dark")
— Dennis Etchison, Shadows 7
Why of course it's unlikely!' I said. 'Oh, by far!The awesome-est things in the world often are!
— Al Yankovic, My New Teacher and Me!
Soak blanket in gravy and make a delicious brick wrap. Serve in All Gravy Room at the Mandrake Hotel.
— Christoph Fischer
Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad
—  it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.
I sometimes wonder whether the act of surrender is not one of the greatest of all - the highest. It is one of the [most] difficult of all... You see it's so immensely complicated. It needs real humility and at the same time, an absolute belief in one's own essential freedom. It is an act of faith. At the last moments, like all great acts, it is pure risk. This is true for me as a human being and as a writer. Dear Heaven, how hard it is to let go - to step into the blue. And yet one's creative life depends on it and one desires to do nothing else.
— Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Mansfield Letters And Journals: A Selection
Edward Gibbon, in his classic work on the fall of the Roman Empire, describes the Roman era's declension as a place where "bizarreness masqueraded as creativity.
— Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Hallo, Pooh,” said Rabbit.“Hallo, Rabbit,” said Pooh dreamily.“Did you make that song up?”“Well, I sort of made it up,” said Pooh. “It isn’t Brain,” he went on humbly, “because You Know Why, Rabbit; but it comes to me sometimes.”“Ah!” said Rabbit, who never let things come to him, but always went and fetched them.
— A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner
Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Boredom is a lack of crazy. Its a lack of creativity. Invention. Innovation. If you're bored, blame yourself.
— Katelyn S. Bolds
Even though artists of all kinds claim to put their hearts and souls into their works, it will only confuse you, for example, if you try to discern a painter by his paintings. His masterpiece may be the master because of its iridescence; it may display a hundred different perspectives through his single face.
— Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
This was the sort of ebullience and élan I prayed for when I felt the desire to write. I used to sit down and wait for this to happen. But it never did happen- not this way. It happened afterwards, sometimes when I had left the machine and gone for a walk. Yes, suddenly it would come on, like an attack, pell-mell, from every direction, a veritable inundation, an avalanche- and there I was, helpless, miles away from the typewriter, not a piece of paper in my pocket.
— Henry Miller, Sexus
Work as if there's no one to help you, and learn as if everybody is with you.
— saransh garg
Spiritual growth and creativity are two sides of the same coin.
— Lada Ray
For years to come the debris of a convulsed world will beset our steps. It will require a purpose stronger than any man and worthy of all men to calm and inspirit us. A sane society whose riches are happy children, men and women, beautiful with peace and creative activity, is not going to be ordained for us. We must make it ourselves.
— Helen Keller, The Open Door
Something went greatly wrong in our collective history and the starting point of it was the industrial revolution. Our school systems are focussed on a single objective: to produce model citizens for society in order to feed this machine and prevent its breakdown. That’s why our school systems have no interest in developing models that actually require and stimulate useful values in people, such as courage or imagination or inventiveness. None of these are taught in our schools, on the contrary the system focuses on memorizing. Memorizing is a way of overloading the mind with mental baggage it doesn’t really need. Besides being horribly dull and stiffening the effect of 20 years of abundant memorization training is modern man: an unimaginative creature stuffed with useless knowledge and unable to clean his mind of this information dirt: our school systems are purposely constructed to deliver mental automatons that are unable to think creatively.
— Martijn Benders
I create, therefore I am.
— Lada Ray
On Pilgrim's Progress: “I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colors.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
God is the creator, so for that human creativity is a work of Divine.
— Petra Remes
Economics itself offers a parallel that explains why this integration affects creativity. Clay Christensen has written about the “Innovator’s Dilemma”: the fact that large traditional firms find it rational to ignore new, breakthrough technologies that compete with their core business. The same analysis could help explain why large, traditional media companies will undermine our tradition of free culture. The property right that is copyright is no longer the balanced right that it was, or was intended to be. The property right that is copyright has become unbalanced, tilted toward an extreme. The opportunity to create and transform becomes weakened in a world in which creation requires permission and creativity must check with a lawyer.
— Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
We're all innately creative
—  I'm not bringing anything magical to it. Ninety percent of inventing is putting in the hours and just trying. You don't need to make a big leap—you - need to take a thousand small steps.
Creativity is nothing but an intelligent imitation.
— Sandeep Kakkar
Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing... the rest will follow.
— Jane Yolen
You receive a great number of rewards as soon as you begin creating something you dream of deep within your soul.
— Marc Allen, The Millionaire Course: A Visionary Plan for Creating the Life of Your Dreams
People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on. There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.
— Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales
Ingenuity requires creativity.
— Veronica Roth, Insurgent
For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is constantly ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking. He must create if he can, first and foremost, especially if his creation does not side-step the problems of his time.
— Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
I’d stumbled upon the inner sanctuary of a woman who loved the world. Loved the faces of people she saw. Loved the way a hand looked when it was relaxed. Loved the way a woman looked when she touched her own face. The way a man looked when he opened himself to her. Loved the way wind changed a tree or a field or a child’s hair. The beauty of a neck meeting a shoulder. The softness of a smile that wasn’t forced.
— Laura Anderson Kurk, Perfect Glass
What we wish for, dream and imagine is the very framework and foundation of everything we create
— Cynthia Sue Larson, Reality Shifts: When Consciousness Changes the Physical World
Art was as much in the activity as in the results. Works of art were not just the finished product, but the thought, the action, the process that created them.
— Jean M. Auel, The Mammoth Hunters
All our contemporaries...had some big ideology to live for. Everybody thought he had to either fight in Spain or die for something else, and most of us had to be in prison for one reason or another. And then at the end it turns out that none of these great ideologies was worth your sacrificing anything for. Even doing personal good is very difficult to be absolutely sure about. It's very difficult to know exactly whether to live for an ideology or even to live for doing good. But there cannot be anything wrong in making a pot, I'll tell you. When making a pot you can't bring any evil into the world. - Eva Zeisel, ceramist.
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention