c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Successful continual learning means maintaining a balance and variety of success-oriented attributes, the most prominent being awareness, confidence, persistence, determination, courage, and focus. But curiosity, ingenuity, and creativity may be even more important as it is these traits that fuel the desire to continue to question and challenge the status quo.
— Lorii Myers, No Excuses, The Fit Mind-Fit Body Strategy Book
To make a real independent film where the filmmaker is in charge creatively, one must sacrifice personal, financial, and physical well-being.
— Mark Polish, The Declaration of Independent Filmmaking: An Insider's Guide to Making Movies Outside of Hollywood
Reality shifts occur when we are in a dreamy state of energized awareness in which we are clear about what we prefer
— Cynthia Sue Larson, Reality Shifts: When Consciousness Changes the Physical World
When you're making something, you're in a different state. You go into a deep level of concentration, to the point where you're not self-conscious anymore, it's just flowing out of you.
— David Rakoff, Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems
Venture deep into the wilderness of lost thought to the point that you physically shiver with apprehension, and there you will find creativity
— Carl Henegan
The most creative approach is often the simple approach.
— Phil Cooke
My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.
— John Updike
My mom told me once that Wyatt loved her the way a boy will love his mother, but I loved her the way an artist loves another. Jo taught me what that meant.
— Laura Anderson Kurk, Perfect Glass
Art gives its vision to beauty not always recognized. And it surrenders freely -- whatever power it possesses to every sincere soul that seeks it. But above all else--it presents us with the gift of ourselves.
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
Look at this one.” I picked up a small painting of a man with dark hair and a short, dark beard. He wore a loose shirt, cobalt blue, unbuttoned at the top, showing a prominent, knobby collarbone. He looked…complicated and hungry. She’d captured him focused intensely on a book, his face pressed against a wall like he was resting. Or waiting.
— Laura Anderson Kurk, Perfect Glass
Those who loved with all their heart and mind and might have always thought of death, and those who knew the endless nights of harrowing concern for others have longed for it. The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worthwhile and death welcome. There is no other life I should prefer. Neither should I like not to die." (The Faith of a Heretic)
— Walter Kaufmann
To express open creativity, you first need to create your own space of seclusion.
— Anthony Liccione
Something terrible happens to people who don't create, something poisonous. Creating is a necessity for all humans, like breathing. If you don't do it, you suffer.
— K.A. Laity, Rook Chant: Collected Writings on Witchcraft and Paganism
Sometimes broken hearts are needed, that way you will appreciate the one that handles it with care.
— Lilly Ghalichi
I worried I would miss it, and I knew, from losing Wyatt, that things happen the moment the soul is released. Wyatt had been there in the school, watching me, making sure I survived. Souls linger…they do. They linger a bit before they turn toward eternity. It could be that no matter how perfect their future will be, the past still tugs for a moment.
— Laura Anderson Kurk, Perfect Glass
Jo told me once that she was an old woman everywhere but in her studio. “There I’m only myself,” she’d said. Standing in the middle of masterpieces that only Jo had ever seen and touched, I knew what she meant.
— Laura Anderson Kurk, Perfect Glass
I am a creator, writing like the wind, I carry the weight of a future world in the barrel of a pen, etching my characters into the paper with life giving ink so my dreams and reality might finally meet.
— L.M. Fields
God chose to introduce Himself to us in the first verse of Genesis as a Creator. And yet so few Christians really understand the power of creativity to influence the culture.
— Phil Cooke
If we weren’t already doing it this way, is this the way we would start?
— Paul Depodesta
Great art comes from passion, from a need to expose human spirit in the face of mortality, the small cruelties and heroisms that make up daily life -- that's where great work comes from, and if you enable students in this way to discover those impulses and observations in themselves, those heroisms and cruelties in themselves, you create an atmosphere in which art can emerge.
— Deb Margolis
I can certainly throw out some observation about the process of creating which may be of use. Firstly, it's the best & the worst of worlds, because the only fuel you have to make the fire blaze on the page / screen is the stuff of your own being. An artist consumes his or herself in the act of making art. I can feel that consumption even now, sitting here at my desk at the end of a working day. In order to generate the ideas that I have set on the page for the last 10 or 11 hours I have burned the fuel of my own history. This is, obviously a double-edged sword. In order to give, the artist must take from himself. That's the deal. And it's very important to me that the work I do is the best I can make it, because I know what is being burned up to create. As the villain of Sacrament says: "living & dying, we feed the fire.
— Clive Barker
Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
I'd say I never considered myself a great architect. I'm more of a creative problem solver with good taste and a soft spot for logistical nightmares.
— Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette
I could write about how I feel when I sing, write and create something from heartbreak, sorrow, sadness or just simply nothingness. How nothingness can become the most beautiful, unexplainable feeling that makes you forget about gravity for an hour.
— Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
Where the Divine and the Human Meet" shows how important it is to meet the world with the creativity of an artist, particularly in these uncertain times: "What do we do with chaos? Creativity has an answer. We are told by those who have studied the processes of nature that creativity happens at the border between chaos and order. Chaos is a prelude to creativity. We need to learn, as every artist needs to learn, to live with chaos and indeed to dance with it as we listen to it and attempt some ordering. Artists wrestle with chaos, take it apart, deconstruct and reconstruct from it. Accept the challenge to convert chaos into some kind of order, respecting the timing of it all, not pushing beyond what is possible—combining holy patience with holy impatience--that is the role of the artist. It is each of our roles as we launch the twenty-first century because we are all called to be artists in our own way. We were all artists as children. We need to study the chaos around us in order to turn it into something beautiful. Something sustainable. Something that remains".
— Matthew Fox, Creativity
We are not consumers. For most of humanity’s existence, we were makers, not consumers: we made our clothes, shelter, and education, we hunted and gathered our food.We are not addicts. “I propose that most addictions come from our surrendering our real powers, that is, our powers of creativity.” We are not passive couch potatoes either. “It is not the essence of humans to be passive. We are players. We are actors on many stages…. We are curious, we are yearning to wonder, we are longing to be amazed… to be excited, to be enthusiastic, to be expressive. In short to be alive.” We are also not cogs in a machine. To be so would be to give up our personal freedoms so as to not upset The Machine, whatever that machine is. Creativity keeps us creating the life we wish to live and advancing humanity’s purpose as well.
— Matthew Fox, Creativity
I believe in always being open to learning more through exploration of everything available and following one's sense of curiosity, creativity, and playfulness.
— Jay Woodman
Flexibility is a requirement for survival.
— Roger Von Oech, A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative
To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.
— Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
The creative impulse can be killed, but it cannot be taught...What a teacher can do...in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn. As far as I'm concerned, this providing of oxygen is one of the noblest of all vocations.
— Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet
It's difficult to get your creative juices flowing if you're always being practical, following rules, afraid to make mistakes, not looking into outside areas, or under the influence of any of the other mental locks.
— Roger Von Oech, A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative
Tomorrow is no hazardous affair, a day like any other day: tomorrow is the result of many yesterdays and comes with a potent, cumulative effect. I am tomorrow what I chose to be yesterday and the day before. It is not possible that tomorrow I may negate and nullify everything that led me to this present moment.
— Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye
There is nothing higher-class than real craftsmanship, diversity, originality and the service of skilled human hands.
— Bryant McGill
I hear he liked flowers pretty well.""Yes," said Annie, "he said they were the friends who always came back and never disappointed him."--"Out, Brief Candle
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction
Creation's probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
You and I are stymied in our own creativity. We can only create as sub-creators, and even then our best work is only sub-creation.
— Matt      Chandler, The Explicit Gospel
Creativity and passion dwindle when hungry. Premiums for talent are easier to demand when desperation isn’t part of the equation. If I’m established, I can demand $350 an hour. If I’m desperate, I may accept $5.
— John-Talmage Mathis, For the (Soon) Unemployed: You Against Them
P.S. It's not schizophrenia, it's creativity, there is a difference. My voices go away after I let them tell their stories.
— Ashley Newell
Creativity is the greatest expression of liberty.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.
— Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir
where does creativity come from?  Creativity comes from the Universe itself. “There is music and poetry in the Universe itself — surely we hear it on planet earth.” And Creativity comes from our joys and sorrows, our deep-hearted experiences. It also comes “from and in the heart of God. All our spiritual traditions the world over agree that creativity follows through the human heart and that it flows from the Divine Heart.”Creativity is seen as a spiritual, inwardly-driven activity, directly influenced by a Higher Power, or God. That is the ultimate in inspiration for me: to know I have “permission” to be creative and to be a creator too.
— Matthew Fox, Creativity
Life is a cracked surface at best. Fiction is a nice edifice. / every word/sentence/paragraph gives a writer an opportunity to reinforce or deliberately crack the edifice by screwing with meaning, structure, grammar, the fourth wall, etc. / different types and degrees of cracking produce different arrangements of order and chaos.
— K.J. Bishop
What does one do with experience? Do we react negatively, or do we (pro)create from the space of positivity?
— T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
What if your art could provide everything you ever needed or wanted in life?
— Patti Digh, Creative Is a Verb: If You're Alive, You're Creative
If you're alive, you're creative.
— Patti Digh, Creative Is a Verb: If You're Alive, You're Creative
The audacity of my sagacity is instrumentality to my successity.
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
Sometimes time spent reinventing the wheel results in a revolutionary new rolling device. But sometimes it just amounts to time spent reinventing the wheel.
— Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
We make a home for ourselves, every time we work on something: actors, writers, singers, building these little nests in our gypsy souls, in place of the ones we so seldom seem to make in our own lives. And then suddenly it's over, and we have to start again.
— Alan Brennert
The creative mind plays with the object it loves.
— C.G. Jung
You know how creative people are, we have to try everything until we find our niche.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
Becoming aware of our inner man and woman means to discover the roots and creative potential of both the male and female aspect within ourselves. Becoming aware of the inner man and woman means to understand that they have different visions of life. It means to understand that they have different perspectives and views of life. The inner man and woman are our two wings of love and freedom. Through awareness, acceptance and understanding, we can allow our two wings to develop in a deep and natural harmony. In the world today, a one-sided development of the male side leads to destructivity. A one-sided development of the male side leads to ego, struggle, exhaustion and a separation from life. A one-sided development of the female side leads to passivity and dependence.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being
Creativity finds its own creator.
— Girish Kohli
A Seed for Contemplation:Creative people who cherish the gift of life often slip into the secret chambers of the creative mind. Their solutions are well-rounded, more sensible than those of people who rely solely upon reason as their mainstay. Gratitude unseals fountains of creativity, because a grateful person is relaxed. This allows him to take stock of his circumstances with an objective mind. A creative person often gets three-dimensional answers to his problems. — ,
— Harold Klemp, The Language of Soul: Keys to Living a More Meaningful Life
Many a person over the years has tried- both successfully and unsuccessfully, to get rid of their inner demons. Those who are successful are deemed artists, those who are not are call dreamers at best and lunatics at worse. But where exactly resides that line on which two worlds collide? Does somebody know? Is somebody fit to tell? Who's to say that those deemed lunatics are not just successes on the making? Who says that those who claim to be just a tad bit crazy are not just as crazy as those that had completely lost it? Maybe, and bear with me here…everyone is as crazy as the one before them and the next one could ever possibly be. Maybe at the end- it's just that some have mastered creating a façade of calmness and collection while others don't bother going through all that trouble anymore, if they ever did. Perhaps we all have demons…it's just that some people have demons far more toxic and difficult to ignore than others.
— Eiry Nieves
The noise around us determines how we speak. And how we listen. Just as a conversation suffers in a war zone, art suffers in a culture built on noise. So does our enjoyment of it.
— Michael Gungor, The Crowd, the Critic, and the Muse: A Book for Creators
And so I miss the fertilization that might come from a contact. And for me--yes, I think I might as well admit it--fertilization does come a great deal from contacts. Why then do I avoid them--in a sort of false pride--shyness--timorous modesty? I used to be afraid of falling in love with people--or having them think I was--that I was chasing them (how ridiculous--I am actually always running away!) but now surely--I should be mature enough to be over that. I am no longer afraid of falling in love, and the other false modesties should vanish. I cannot bear to think "par delicatesse j'ai perdu ma vie." (Because of discretion I have lost my life).
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947-1986
The twin aspects of genius, the passive and the active, are possessed by the fully realized artist; they also form the necessary equipment of the Adept. Yet in very few people are these twin aspects manifested. Nearly everyone has a capacity for the passive aspect, which involves some sort of appreciation of aesthetic values. There are few people totally unresponsive to the beauties of nature, and none at all that is not responsive to its ferocious manifestations.Fewer are able to respond profoundly to the beauty of natural phenomena, and fewer still to so-called works of art. It takes a degree of genius to respond to such manifestations the whole time. Artists in this category are among the saints, some of whom thrilled with rapture at the constant awareness of the total unity, harmony, and beauty of things.Such were Boehme, Ramakrishna, etc. Some yogis are immersed in an unsullied and vibrant bliss derived from the incessant contemplation of this 'world-bewitching maya'4-the breath-taking wonder of the great and glamorous illusion which surrounds us.On the other side of the fence, on the side of active or creative genius, there are yet fewer. Active or creative genius means nothing less than the ability to translate the wonder or the terror of the great lfla (the great play of life) in terms of visual, tactile, audible, olfactory, or some other sensual presentation of phenomena.But there is a third aspect of genius which is yet more rare. It is the ability to open the door of the theatre and admit the influences from outside, from the swarming gulfs beyond the grasp of the mind, and accessible only to the magical entity whose fantastic feelers can snare the most fugitive impulses as they flash through the holes in space, the kinks in time, to be reflected in the magic mirror of the artist's mind.
— Kenneth Grant, Outside the Circles Of Time
Science, in all its greatness, is still subject to human creativity. It starts the first moment a child tries to reach up and grab at the clouds. Soon, the child learns that his own hands cannot reach the sky, but his hands are not the limit of his potential. For the human brain observes, considers, understands, and adapts. Locked within the mind is infinite possibility.
— Yukito Kishiro, Aqua Knight, Vol. 3
Try your ideas. You might surprise yourself.
— Jason O'Neill, Bitten by the Business Bug: Common Sense Tips for Business and Life from a Teen Entrepreneur
When you view your world exclusively through the lens of science, your prescription will never be strong enough.
— Jay  Nichols
A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.
— Alain de Botton
Trying to teach creativity is the major hoax of our time along with the Iraq war and plastic surgery" ~ Snarky comment of Clive from "The River Swimmer" (pg 47)
— Jim Harrison
In other words, if Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy showed more than their fair share of pathology it was due less to the requirements of their creative work than to the personal sufferings caused by the unhealthy conditions of a Russian society nearing collapse. If so many American poets and playwrights committed suicide or ended up addicted to drugs and alcohol it was not their creativity that did it but an artistic scene that promised much, gave few rewards and left nine out of ten artists neglected if not ignored.
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
Poetry lets me pour out my various emotions even the suppressed ones we didn't know exist inside us' til the moment you start jotting down what you're feeling. It's more than an escape into the unknown, a refuge for your creativity and sometimes wild imagination not all ordinary, ungifted people like us understand." -Elizabeth's Quotes
— Elizabeth E. Castillo
Often we are identified with either the inner man or woman, while the other side is hidden and unexpressed. Outer relationships are a mirror of the relationship and communication between our own inner man and female side. Sometimes one side is dominant, while the other side is submissive.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, The Silent Whisperings of the Heart - An Introduction to Giten's Approach to Life
It is when we develop both our inner man and woman that we find a new harmony and wholeness within ourselves. Healing means to develop and integrate our inner man and woman so that love can flow between them. To rediscover our own inner source of love, we need to embrace both the male and female sides within ourselves. When these two sides are developed and integrated, a new spark of love, joy, harmony, creativity and wholeness arises within us. Awareness is an inner harmony between opposite poles and tendencies.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, The Silent Whisperings of the Heart - An Introduction to Giten's Approach to Life
A writer's mind can never be empty.
— Michael Acciarino
Love means to understand the drama that happens between the inner man and woman. It means to allow both the inner man and woman to find their creative roots and expression.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, The Silent Whisperings of the Heart - An Introduction to Giten's Approach to Life
Traditionally men have created a deep split between the inner and outer world, between body and soul, between the material and spiritual world, between love and money and between male and female qualities. The inner man and woman are related to money, creativity and financial abundance. Through investigating the roots of the inner man and woman, we can find the creative potential of both the inner man and woman. Sometimes can either the inner man or woman also provide financial support for both sides, while the other side has the idea that it cannot support itself financially.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, The Silent Whisperings of the Heart - An Introduction to Giten's Approach to Life
Through becoming aware of how the inner man and woman relates and communicates inside ourselves, it creates a joy and satisfaction in the three life areas that they influence: our meditation and inner growth, our relationships and our work and creativity.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, The Silent Whisperings of the Heart - An Introduction to Giten's Approach to Life
If the rock band U2 had been born in Orange County, California, would they have become just another church worship band?
— Steve Turner
If the spirit of wonder & curiosity stays alive in us, then surely we will always have new questions, and always expand our creativity in response?
— Jay Woodman
You know how you're always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it's real difficult in life
— Woody Allen, Annie Hall: Screenplay
People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.
— Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
We can't underestimate the value of silence. We need to create ourselves, need to spend time alone. If you don't, you risk not knowing yourself and not realizing your dreams.
— Jewel
Creativity occurs in the moment, and in the moment we are timeless.
— Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way
This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.
— John Cleese
Poetry looking in the mirror sees art, and art looking in a mirror sings poetry.
— Aberjhani, Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.
Art matters. It is not simply a leisure activity for the privileged or a hobby for the eccentric. It is a practical good for the world. The work of the artist is an expression of hope - it is homage to the value of human life, and it is vital to society. Art is a sacred expression of human creativity that shares the same ontological ground as all human work. Art, along with all work is the ordering of creation toward the intention of the creator.
— Michael Gungor, The Crowd, The Critic And The Muse: A Book For Creators
Sometimes paper is only paper," my mothers says. "Words are just words. Ways to capture the real thing. Don't be afraid to remember that."I know what she means. Writing, painting, singing--it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death's footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger without as much fear. For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey there between footsteps makes up our lives.
— Ally Condie, Reached
Some build their castles 'mid thunderbolts and fireworks. My worlds take shape in silence.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.
— Verlyn Klinkenborg
The heart of creativity is an experience of the mystical union
—  the heart of the mystical union is an experience of creativity.
To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.
— Henry Ford
The creative strength is good enough and deep enough to bring itself to flower and to grow in spite of this sickness.
— Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
Reality is only for people with no imagination.
— Gavin Freeman
Artistry exists in everyone. What makes it blossom is a soul's personal desire to find an outlet for expression.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne
we are continuing God’s work of forming, filling, and subduing. Whenever we bring order out of chaos, whenever we draw out creative potential, whenever we elaborate and “unfold” creation beyond where it was when we found it, we are following God’s pattern of creative cultural development.
— Timothy J. Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World
Artists shouldn't wait until they are told what their art should be, they shouldn't follow trends or allow other people to influence their work, an artist should only create from the strongest emotions within their heart
— Andrew James Pritchard
He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.
— John Fowles, The Collector
This kind of passionate faith can be painful. Not caring is easy. Caring hurts. Caring costs you something. But without this sort of faith, you will never create to your fullest potential. Faith is a gift. Like I've said, felt belief is not necessarily something that you choose to have or not to have. But it is a gift that you can open yourself to receive.
— Michael Gungor, The Crowd, The Critic And The Muse: A Book For Creators
as an artist, one of the toughest things to do is getting someone to understand why you think the way you think. And as much as i don't wanna care what they think about my thinking, it comes down to making them understand or watching them leave.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
Strategy was first used in Athens (508 BC) to describe the art of leadership used by the ten generals on the war council. Some argue for the more creative, human side, while others argue for the more analytic side of strategy.
— Max McKeown, The Strategy Book
...if you always move in certainty, your writing will be flat - creativity is a rugged terrain...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Schools kill time and creativity. Find ways to workaround these limitations
— Gossy Ukanwoke
When people sleep, others stay awake to effect changes in the world. Every other person wakes up in the morning to a totally different world
— Gossy Ukanwoke
A true great artist at heart never ceases to create, continuously amazes and keeps sharing his gift despite barriers, judgement, fears and dreaded myths. If you stopped being creative out of fear or loss of self-esteem or pride, you were never an artist first and foremost for you have ran away from your true calling." - Elizabeth's Quotes
— Elizabeth E. Castillo, Seasons of Emotions
Many gardeners will agree that hand-weeding is not the terrible drudgery that it is often made out to be. Some people find in it a kind of soothing monotony. It leaves their minds free to develop the plot for their next novel or to perfect the brilliant repartee with which they should have encountered a relative's latest example of unreasonableness.
— Christopher  Lloyd, The Well-Tempered Garden
The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilising of it. No human soul can long ignore "the giant agony of the world" and live, except indeed the mollusc life, a barnacle upon eternity.
— Helen Waddell, The Desert Fathers
Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.	These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.
— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
To live a creative life we must first lose the fear of being wrong.
— Joseph Chilton Pearce
The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. ... Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers — common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
In the case of the creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude. You worthy critics, or whatever you may call yourselves, are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and passing madness which is found in all real creators, the longer or shorter duration of which distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. Hence your complaints of unfruitfulness, for you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.
— Friedrich Schiller
The more we become able to become a child again, to keep ourselves childlike, the more we can understand that because we love the world and we are open to understanding, to comprehension, that when we kill the child in us, we are no longer.
— Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change
A scientist, an artist, a citizen is not like a child who needs papa methodology and mama rationality to give him security and direction; he can take care of himself, for he is the inventor not only of laws, theories, pictures, plays, forms of music, ways of dealing with his fellow man, institutions but also of entire world views, he is the inventor of entire forms of life.
— Paul Karl Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society
Curiosity is very important I think, and I think too much of education, starting with childhood education, is either designed to kill curiosity or it works out that way anyway.
— Myles Horton, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change
When I think of normality I think of mediocrity
— Gillian Anderson
We create things to watch them grow, Ruin, she said. To take pleasure in seeing that which we love become more than it was before.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages
...the imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.
— Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works
One is either an artist or one is not. It is not something one becomes. It is something that one is from birth. We do not study to be artists. We study to become more proficient. To understand more.
— Edward Swift
The reflection of chaos is creativity.
— Lionel Suggs
I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.
— Ezra Pound
It is not many things that modern psychology agress upon, but all the different approaches of psychology agrees on one thing: that people in groups become more stupid. Individually people are more intelligent, because they have to take their own responsibility, but in a group they do not have to take the same responsibility. The two basic power strategies to try to manipulate and gain control over another person are: silencing and attacking. Silencing means to not listen to, to exclude or ignore and not respect a person. Attack can both mean to attack a person directly or to try to discredit a person through lies, to ridicule a person or by spreading malicious rumours. All organizations are more or less dysfunctional. In a dysfunctional group, the members of the group play three different roles: agressor, denier and victim. The agressor is the role that attack and ridicule people, the denier never knows what is going on, there is “no body at home”, and the victim is the resultat of these two roles. It is always easier to follow a group without awareness, than to follow your own heart, to trust your own intelligence, love, truth, silence and creativity.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being
History tells creativity is a result of Soul song.
— Aporva Kala, Life... Love... Kumbh...
One should not confuse creativity with whining.
— Silvia Hartmann
If it’s a pure expression of yourself no matter what it is or what medium, it’s going to shine. It’s going to resonate. You could look inside of yourself and you could have a canvas and you could paint a dot in it, but if that is where your creative purpose is taking you then it needs to be that dot.
— Rainn Wilson
The Indians say to draw someone's portrait is to steal their soul, i am taking photographs, does it mean that i am just borrowing them?
— T.A
No matter how hard they try, they'll never create anything so perfectly beautiful as what plays out in my own imagination.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
The basket would never make her famous or end up in a museum. The best part of it was the making of it, sitting at the table weaving while outside the lake crashed into shore and the seagulls roosted somewhere for the night and two women stopped for a moment to watch.
— Ellen Airgood, South of Superior
Authors always carry a means for scribbling and an excuse for pausing, often inopportunely, to record those fleeting sparks of creative fancy that might otherwise vanish like a wisp in the wind if ignored.  Writing is a jealous and needy lover.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
But it’s still a big fight to get the work you’re really excited about onto shelves. And past that, convincing someone to pay you to do the work that you are most excited about is more than a trick, it’s a fucking scam of a magic trick.
— Brandon S. Graham
Consider the blundering anarchic system of the United States the stupidity of some of its lawmakers, the violent reaction, the slowness of its ability to change. Twenty-five key men destroyed could make the Soviet Union stagger, but we could lose our congress, our president, and our general staff and nothing much would have happened. We would go right on. In fact we might be better for it.
— John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez
Oh, man. I’m not interested to driving the Lamborghini. I’m more interested in making Lamborghini. That’s what creativity means to me.
— Seong pill kon
The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker... The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God.
— George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts
if you believe in creativity,you will find solutions for every problems.
— Thanakit Chansong
We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can't steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that's how you will find your voice.
— Francis Ford Coppola
Lies can open up the doors to imagination.
— Lionel Suggs
Art for Art’s Sake is for the well fed. The well fed are all the babies in cradles and my kitty along with them, and I am happy if my writings are for my kitty.
— Lara Biyuts, The Dome
I hope that I capture something in my work that is about the elusive, the magical and powerful and the transformative. The writing in itself is transformative for me.
— H. Raven Rose, Liquid Me: Poetry and Prose
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.
— Marc Chagall
The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak
—  when you’re present in the current moment
To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
And so we keep on thinking, because the next thought might be the answer.
— Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works
I place my fingers upon these keys typing 2,000 dreams per minute and naked of spirit dance forth my cosmic vortex upon this crucifix called language.
— Aberjhani, Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black
With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. Connoissers admire the "skill" (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the "quality of painting" (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away. The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures "nice" or "splendid." Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing.
— Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
The boys were amazed that I could make such a poem as that out of my own head, and so was I, of course, it being as much a surprise to me as it could be to anybody, for I did not know that it was in me. If any had asked me a single day before if it was in me, I should have told them frankly no, it was not.That is the way with us; we may go on half of our life not knowing such a thing is in us, when in reality it was there all the time, and all we needed was something to turn up that would call for it.
— Mark Twain, Joan of Arc
Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.
— Marcus Valerius Martialis, Epigrams
It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry -- if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep on working until the work is done. Woody Allen famously declared that "eighty percent of success is showing up." NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) teaches kids how to show up again and again.
— Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works
The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours,' [T.S.] Eliot wrote. 'But less talent was wasted.
— Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works
Writing and drawing are very therapeutic, but they are also an excellent manifestation tool. I teach my clients to draw what they want, or to write a story about it to bring the manifestation forward into the present.
— Alice McCall, Wellness Wisdom - Inspired by One Woman's Journey with Breast Cancer
If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.
— Piaget
At least I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it.
— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started in the creation of the work. In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness. When a simile takes us aback and persuades us together, when we find a juxtaposition in a picture both odd and intriguing, when a theory is at once fresh and convincing, we do not merely nod over someone else's work. We re-enact the creative act, and we ourselves make the discovery again......Reality is not an exhibit for man's inspection, labeled: "Do not touch." There are no appearances to be photographed, no experiences to be copied, in which we do not take part. We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.
— Jacob Bronowski
Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up.
— David Rakoff, Half Empty
I hate being a writer. i tend to stick my emotions in things that cannot reciprocate. I've become a whore for my craft.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
...Why are corporations so fleeting?...Instead of imitating the freewheeling city, these businesses minimize the very interactions that lead to new ideas. They erect walls and establish hierarchies. They keep people from relaxing and having insights. They stifle conversations, discourage dissent, and suffocate social networks. Rather than maximizing employee creativity they become obsessed with minor efficiencies.
— Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works
The vocational approach at NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) helps build grit in students. It teaches them how to be single-minded in pursuit of a goal, to sacrifice for the sake of a passion. The teachers demand hard work from their kids because they know, from personal experience, that creative success requires nothing less.
— Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works
Fear and self-doubt are the deadly enemies of creativity. Don’t invite either into your mind.
— Don Roff
The most beautiful work of art that we can create is this life.
— Kristi Bowman
Creativity and ideas fired between every synapse underneath my skin and I felt radiant from the inside out.
— Belinda Jeffrey, One Long Thread
I am the wood frame, the bundle of ox hair, and the creative spark... my value unhangable.
— Marina Leigh Hatfield
One with true creativity can erase their one past, and replace it with an infinite number of pasts, creating new possibilities for the future.
— Lionel Suggs
What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
— Adam Gopnik
If you knew all about it, it wouldn't be the leading edge.
— Karl H. Pribram
There is nothing in the world which an artist cannot recreate into something poetic, ennobling. And why do we read these things? They are not facts, they do not improve our business skills, our techniques in manufacturing goods, the management of a home. That is what most of you will be doing anyway. We read these because they teach us about people, we can see ourselves in them, in their problems. And by seeing ourselves in them, we clarify ourselves, we explain ourselves to ourselves, so we can live with ourselves…
— F. Sionil José
Purpose stirs creativity, without purpose you life will be in abnormal use(abuse).
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
This book began with the assertion that Margaret Fuller's life was her most remarkable creation. It is just possible, however, that her most wonderful creations may still lie in the future. Fuller's most precious gift to us may reside in the ideas and the works, still yet to be imagined, of women and men who follow her example. We may decide that, despite all that Margaret Fuller endured and suffered in order to become exceptional, her life, or rather her lives, well deserve imitating.
— John Matteson, The Lives of Margaret Fuller
Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.
— Albert Einstein
We are never more creative than when we are at odds with the world and there is nothing so artistically destructive as comfort. Princess Leia taught me that.
— Simon Pegg
Truly creative people care little about what they have done, and a lot about what they are doing.
— Alan Cohen
If you're "one in a million", and the world is full of seven billion people, that means there are seven thousand people just like you.
— Jeff Goins
Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.
— Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales
To tell you the truth, though, I still haven't made up my mind whether I shall publish at all. Tastes differ so widely, and some people are so humourless, so uncharitable, and so absurdly wrong-headed, that one would probably do far better to relax and enjoy life than worry oneself to death trying to instruct or entertain a public which will only despise one's efforts, or at least feel no gratitude for them.
— Thomas More, Utopia
In strange and uncertain times such as those we are living in, sometimes a reasonable person might despair. But hope is unreasonable and love is greater even than this. May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse.
— Robert  Fripp
The only way to maximize group creativity—to make the whole more than the sum of its parts—is to encourage a candid discussion of mistakes. In part, this is because the acceptance of error reduces cost. When you believe your flaws will be quickly corrected by the group, you're less worried about perfecting your contribution, which leads to a more candid conversation. We can only get it right when we talk about what we got wrong.
— Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works
She has given me a way out.
— Alison Bechdel