c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.
— Charles Baudelaire, The Painter Of Modern Life And Other Essays
But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.
— Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water
That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.
— Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.
— Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
Thoughts are like burning stars, and ideas, they flood, they stretch the universe.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
— George Bernard Shaw
When you have wit of your own, it's a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.
— Joyce Carol Oates, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982
The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
— Arthur Koestler
I can always be distracted by love, but eventually I get horny for my creativity.
— Gilda Radner
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
I've always felt that the best whips and chains are in the mind. With a little creativity, the physical ones are hardly necessary.
— Jim Butcher, Blood Rites
Routine kills creative thought.
— Scarlett Thomas, PopCo
I dream in fire but work in clay.
— Arthur Machen
In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.
— Rollo May
Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever
— Anna Quindlen
look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you...
— Colette
I would say that he has a rather limited and uncreative way of looking at the situation.
— Jeremy Leven and Lord Byron
Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
— Arthur Koestler, Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955-1967
Originality is the best form of rebellion.
— Mike Sasso, Being Human: Everything you didn't want to know about life.
Creativity is a continual surprise.
— Ray Bradbury
Creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.
— Ken Robinson
As you take the normal opportunities of your daily life and create something of beauty and helpfulness, you improve not only the world around you but also the world within you.
— Dieter F. Uchtdorf
Creative power is mightier than its possessor.
— C.G. Jung
Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our performance, but we need quiet time to figure things out, to emerge with new discoveries, to unearth original answers.
— Ester Buchholz
I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. (...) Boredom opens up the space, for new engagements. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are.
— Slavoj Žižek
Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our integrity and awareness, the more original and creative our time will become.
— John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings
The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony.
— Heraclitus
If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight
I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
— Leonard Bernstein
All good work requires self-revelation.
— Sidney Lumet, Making Movies
Creativity arises from our ability to see things from many different angles.
— Keri Smith, How to Be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum
Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.
— John Cleese
He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.
— Peter S. Beagle, The Tolkien Reader
The truth is that creative activity is one that involves the entire self - our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds.
— Robert Greene, Mastery
Supposedly there's an actual, researched link between extreme creativity and mental illness, and I believe it because I've seen it with my own eyes.
— Deb Caletti, Wild Roses
Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.
— Leonard Bernstein
The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain.
— Nikola Tesla, My Inventions
Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.
— R. Buckminster Fuller
My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life.
— Miles Davis
How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of "green"?
— Stan Brakhage
Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. . . Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.
— Maya Angelou
You cannot teach creativity—how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.” Mario Vargas Llosa
— Mario Vargas Llosa
You can’t keep bitch-slapping your creativity, or it’ll run away and find a new pimp.
— George Meyer
It’s an artist’s right to rebel against the world’s stupidity.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work.
— Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. 
— Alice Walker
Art – the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised
— James Thurber
DeathWish: You spent some time working with Courtney Love and Billy Corgan on a creative level, how did this experience help your growth as an artist?EA: It didn't -- it stunted it entirely. I gave up over a year of my life and career helping Billy with his flop of an album and designing and building all of the costumes for his music video. With Courtney, we were friends, but I spent years working to record and promote her flop of an album only to find that my value increased every time I peed in an orange juice bottle so that she could fake her way through a drug test. Not exactly a haven for artistic growth.
— Emilie Autumn
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order
— Virginia Woolf
Jack," said Charles, "he's making up words again.""Yes," Jack replied, "but he's getting better at it, don't you think?
— James A. Owen, The Search for the Red Dragon
The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur. That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you're already doing. Thinking more about what their needs are, and responding accordingly. Avoid the dullards; avoid the folk who play it safe. They can't help you anymore. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct, they are extinction.
— Hugh MacLeod
Let the blood and the bruises define your legacy.
— Lady Gaga
The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Every one who has taken a shower has had an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it that makes a difference.
— Nolan Bushnell
A good-enough novel violently written now is better than a perfect novel meticulously written never.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
— Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.
— Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography
I've never believed that they're separate. Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist. Michelangelo knew a tremendous amount about how to cut stone at the quarry. The finest dozen computer scientists I know are all musicians. Some are better than others, but they all consider that an important part of their life. I don't believe that the best people in any of these fields see themselves as one branch of a forked tree. I just don't see that.People bring these things together a lot. Dr. Land at Polaroid said, "I want Polaroid to stand at the intersection of art and science," and I've never forgotten that. I think that that's possible, and I think a lot of people have tried.
— Steve Jobs
The mind I love most must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.
— Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Mansfield Notebooks: Complete Edition
Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.
— John Barth
You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to
— William S. Burroughs
When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher.
— Frédéric Chopin
Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.
— Rita Mae Brown
One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.
— Robert M. Pirsig
Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.
— George Lois
Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard 
— Michael Michalko
If you’re creative, if you can think independently, if you can articulate passion, if you can override the fear of being wrong, then your company needs you more than it ever did. And now your company can no longer afford to pretend that isn’t the case. So dust off your horn and start tooting.
— Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
— Saul Steinberg
You can have anything you want so long as you realise that you can't have everything you want.
— Orna Ross, Inspiration Meditation: Igniting Insights & Ideas.
Every animal leaves traces of what it was
—  man alone leaves traces of what he created.
What if the very reason you were created was to be creative?
— Michelle Dennis Evans
The perfect state of creative bliss is having power (you are 50) and knowing nothing (you are 9). This assures an interesting and successful outcome.
— Tibor Kalman
Creativity is a gift. It doesn't come through if the air is cluttered.
— John Lennon
They're only crayons. You didn't fear them in Kindergarten, why fear them now?
— Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.
— Terry Tempest Williams, Leap
The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.
— Vilayat Inayat Khan
If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.
— Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant
I believe that true identity is found . . . in creative activity springing from within. It is found, paradoxically, when one loses oneself. Woman can best refind herself in some kind of creative activity of her own.
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Uncertainty is a quality to be cherished, therefore – if not for it, who would dare to undertake anything?
— Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.
— Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.
— Edward de Bono
... all too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own.[2002] p.46
— Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life
I'm interested in the moment when two objects collide and generate a third. The third object is where the interesting work is.
— Bruce Mau
I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.
— Criss Jami, Venus in Arms
You cannot reconcile creativeness with technical achievement. You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter...having lost the song, we pursue the singer. We learn from the singer the technique of song, but there is no song; and I say the song is essential, the joy of singing is essential. When the joy is there, the technique can be built up from nothing; you will invent your own technique, you won't have to study elocution or style. When you have, you see, and the very seeing of beauty is an art.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
The conventional mind is passive - it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The dimensional mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.
— Robert Greene, Mastery
Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.
— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
Given the freedom to create, everybody is creative. All of us have an innate, instinctive desire to change our environment, to put our original stamp on this world, to tell a story never told before. I’m absolutely thrilled at the moment of creativity – when suddenly I’ve synthesized my experiences, reality, and my imagination into something entirely new. But most people are too busy working on survival to find the opportunity to create. Fortunately, I’ve been freed by reputation, by the economics of success, and by emotional contentment to turn my ideas into reality. I’ve discovered that the more freedom I have to be creative, the more creative I become.
— William Shatner, Up Till Now
Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience.
— Masaru Ibuka
Rules are a great way to get ideas. All you have to do is break them.
— Jack Foster, How to Get Ideas
He’s a pagan! I’m an artist! We’re naturally sympathetic!
— Sidney Howard
The palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity. . . . I built a temple in my head. . . . Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its corridors were the passages of my own brain.
— Lisa St. Aubin de Terán, The Palace the Palace
Creative people, especially those who are just starting out, feel that they have to conform and be a mass-produced product in order to be noticed. The truth of the matter is that genuineness and unconventionality is often what helps make a mark on the world.
— Veronika Carnaby
For the person with creative potential there is no wholeness except in using it.
— Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant As Leader
GOOD IDEAS ALTER THE BALANCE IN RELATIONSHIPS. THAT IS WHY GOOD IDEAS ARE ALWAYS INITIALLY RESISTED.
— Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.
— Rollo May, The Courage to Create
After joyfully working each morning, I would leave off around midday to challenge myself to a footrace. Speeding along the sunny paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg, ideas would breed like aphids in my head—for creative invention is easy and sublime when air cycles quickly through the lungs and the body is busy at noble tasks.
— Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
Does it not occur to people that I might be artificial by nature?
— Maurice Ravel
On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
— Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet
It often feels like a tremendous amount of work is required to get an idea moving forward, like pushing a train uphill. But at a certain point, the thing takes on its own momentum, and takes unexpected turns. So it's that feeling of holding on, rather than pushing it, that is the most exciting thing. It's that need to occasionally bounce off the walls, letting anything happen for any reason, and having nothing to guide you that is the joy.
— Danny Elfman
You have to be emotionally attached to what you are doing.
— Brad Bird
**New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.**That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision.[first-line bold by author][2002] p.23
— Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life
My head was a desolate place and as barren as the bare hills of Le Marche. Until I began to build in it, only vultures nested there.
— Lisa St. Aubin de Terán, The Palace the Palace
If I ever conceive any original idea, it will be because I have been abnormally prone to confuse ideas ... and I have thus found remote analogies and relations which others have not considered! Others rarely make these confusions, and proceed by precise analysis.
— Kenneth J.W. Craik
Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness.
— Julia Cameron
Humor and paradox are often the only ways to respond to life's sorrow with grace.
— Matthew Fox
There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.
— Edward de Bono
Creativity is a great motivator because it makes people interested in what they are doing. Creativity gives hope that there can be a worthwhile idea. Creativity gives the possibility of some sort of achievement to everyone. Creativity makes life more fun and more interesting.
— Edward de Bono
There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.
— G.K. Chesterton
Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
He thought his detective brain as good as the criminal's, which was true. But he fully realised the disadvantage. "The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic," he said with a sour smile, and lifted his coffee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put salt in it.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown
Every creative story is different. And every creative story is the same. There was nothing. Now there is something. It's almost like magic.
— Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works
The ideas are louder when there are fewer of them.
— David C. Day
Critique by creating.
— Michelangelo Buonarroti
Even when alternative views are clearly wrong, being exposed to them still expands our creative potential. In a way, the power of dissent is the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer, we work to understand it, which causes us to reassess our initial assumptions and try out new perspectives. “Authentic dissent can be difficult, but it’s always invigorating,” [Charlan] Nemeth [a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley] says. “It wakes us right up.
— Jonah Lehrer
We have one precious life: do something extraordinary today, even if it's tiny. A pebble starts the avalanche.
— K.A. Laity
If we allow our "high creativity" to remain alive, we will never be bored. We can pray, standing in line at the super market. Or we can be lost in awe at all the people around us, their lives full of glory and tragedy, and suddenly we will have the beginnings of a painting, a story, a song.
— Madeleine L'Engle
Imagination is not an icing on the cake of life but the oven in which it is baked.
— Orna Ross
Learn the craft of knowing how to open your heart and to turn on your creativity. There’s a light inside of you.
— Judith Jamison
Writing is the silence of the soul struggling to be heard
— GBickle
Creativity is a talent we inherit from God.
— Kim Chestney, The Psychic Workshop: A Complete Program for Fulfilling Your Spiritual Potential
You build a thing of beauty, and then the peasants storm the castle, hooting and chanting and calling you a heretic.
— Vic S. Sussman
I'm a bit of a night owl because that's when I feel the most creative and alive.
— Christina Aguilera
The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind.However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity.---- Afterword to "Hothouse" Brian Aldiss
— Brian W. Aldiss, Hothouse
To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted
— George Keller
The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer
— Alfred de Musset, Lorenzaccio
There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not “decorate” it; she infused it.
— Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds
— Alfred de Vigny, Stello
In the white man's world, language, too -- and the way which the white man thinks of it--has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace. On every side of him there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in on him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language -- for the Word itself -- as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word.
— N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
You came here because we do this better than you and part of that is letting our creatives be unproductive until they are.
— Don Draper
Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art...I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.
— Quentin Crisp
Like so many creative men of his school he was hounded by an incessant
— restlessness.
But out of limitations comes creativity.
— Debbie Allen
Be not afraid of being called un-fashionable.
— Adolf Loos
Innovation is creativity with a job to do.
— John Emmerling
Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.
— Florence King
Be creative! Write, sing, dance, paint, whatever you do, make something for your Maker!
— Marja Meijers
Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good...The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
One of the strangest things is the act of creation.You are faced with a blank slate—a page, a canvas, a block of stone or wood, a silent musical instr
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
I had fallen into a profound dream-like reverie in which I heard him speaking as at a distance. 'And yet there is no one who communes with only one god,' he was saying, 'and the more a man lives in imagination and in a refined understanding, the more gods does he meet with and talk with, and the more does he come under the power of Roland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles the last trumpet of the body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw them perishing away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for them up and down the world and could not find them; and under the power of all those countless divinities who have taken upon themselves spiritual bodies in the minds of the modern poets and romance writers, and under the power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance have won everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds and fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense. The many think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips.
— W.B. Yeats, Rosa Alchemica
But I should caution that if you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them—if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the line—well, you’re deluding yourself. For one thing, it’s easier to plan derivative work—things that copy or repeat something already out there. So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal.
— Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
Creativity is a magic wand that works two ways. When you set it in action and seek to create something, it does not just brings into existence that object or work, it also raises in your heart a dream, a hope, and a will to achieve that creation. And when all else seems lost and steeped in hopelessness, the magic of creativity can still keep you going. For when all else seem dark, an urge to create something would still give you an aim to look forward to. And if you just take hold of this urge, it will take hold of you and see you through even the darkest times. Like it did to me.
— Jyoti Arora
Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables.
— Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
Sculley found Jobs as memorable as his machine. " He seemed more a showman than a businessman. Every move seemed calculated, as if it was rehearsed, to create an occasion of the moment.
— Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
Creativity is fragile; if you don't nurture it, it can die, leaving you recycling old ideas and pretending they're fresh. It's a sure road to mediocrity.
— Lee Silber, Time Management for the Creative Person
Thus, words being symbols of ideas, we can collect ideas by collecting words. The fellow who said he tried reading the dictionary but couldn't get the hang of the story simply missed the point: namely, that it is a collection of short stories.
— James Webb Young, A Technique for Producing Ideas
Own your creativity. You are creative with the same juice that flows in all of life. The question is not whether you are creative enough but whether you will free yourself to express it.
— Ian Roberts, Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
Sometimes I don’t understand why my arms don’t drop from my body with fatigue, why my brain doesn’t melt away. I am leading an austere life, stripped of all external pleasure, and am sustained only by a kind of permanent frenzy, which sometimes makes me weep tears of impotence but never abates. I love my work with a love that is frantic and perverted, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt that scratches his belly. Sometimes, when I am empty, when words don’t come, when I find I haven’t written a single sentence after scribbling whole pages, I collapse on my couch and lie there dazed, bogged down in a swamp of despair, hating myself and blaming myself for this demented pride that makes me pant after a chimera. A quarter of an hour later, everything has changed; my heart is pounding with joy.
— Gustave Flaubert
Creativity is not so much a boundless well, but an all-you-can-eat buffet of elements for your creative endeavor.Eventually you've eaten your fill, and it's time to digest and then make something.But at some point, it will be time to return to the restaurant.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.
— Henry Miller
Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness often appear to be the same thing. They both have a tendency to blur the lines of what we call norms, or established reality. They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures.-- from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius
— Aberjhani, Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.
Many articles and books on creativity encourage us to 'think out of the box' and get rid of all the restrictions on our thinking. The trouble with this advice is that it is almost entirely wrong. It is very difficult to be creative when 'anything goes' and you have no limitations, because it is the limitations that actually encourage creativity.
— Mark Forster, Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management
They spell-caught the sounds of cat paws, the breath of fish, the spittle of birds, the hairs of a woman's beard, and the roots of a mountain, and spun them around the sinews of a bear. That made a bond that looked as fine as a ribbon of silk, but, since it was made of things not in this world, it was so strong nothing in the world could break it.
— Ingri d'Aulaire, D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths
Almost nothing beautiful or brilliant happens unless a person has thought about it a lot.
— Eric Maisel
Regardless of whether you are a man or a woman, everyone births things into reality.
— Margaret Ann Lembo, Chakra Awakening: Transform Your Reality Using Crystals, Color, Aromatherapy & the Power of Positive Thought
There is new research showing that our creative potential increases with age. Our creativity is a product of our inner and outer experience, and as we get older, we have all kinds of experience to draw on. Also, research tells us that creativity brings energy, vitality and good health.
— Sandra A. Cusack
It turns out that indecision is a path itself; but figuratively, a vertical path - up or down - meaning it isn't always a fruitless path. One is forgotten, but the other is glorified. To be what they call 'middle-of-the-road' in most cases just means you have a hard time figuring out who between options is dumber. So quite often those who refused to decide were, after all, the bold individuals, the influential ones, the creative ones, those who snatched their own authority.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Innovation is deviance which means that the rebellious personality is a natural resource for practical creativity. As an innovator, you need to reject the old to establish a new, better, status quo. And one of the most powerful sources of newness is the rebel or maverick, mind.
— Max McKeown
What would you do if you saw something nobody else could see?”The tape gun fell out of Luke’s hand, and hit the tiled hearth. He knelt to pick it up, not looking at her. “You mean if I were the only witness to a crime, that sort of thing?”“No. I mean, if there were other people around, but you were the only one who could see something. As if it were invisible to everyone but you.”He hesitated, still kneeling, the dented tape gun gripped in his hand.“I know it sounds crazy,” Clary ventured nervously, “but…”He turned around. His eyes, very blue behind the glasses, rested on her with a look of firm affection. “Clary, you’re an artist, like your mother. That means you see the world in ways that other people don’t. It’s your gift, to see the beauty and the horror in ordinary things. It doesn’t make you crazy—just different. There’s nothing wrong with being different.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Bones
Within you is the power of unlimited creation.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
People won't see Imagination in something that doesn't relate to their experience because of their own mental limitations. I want people to escape the expected and ordinary, to escape the regular expectations of a story, and truly step into a different world of literature.
— Lionel Suggs
Alas! It seems to me that when one is as good as this at dissecting children who are to born, one can’t stiffen up enough to create them.
— Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
You cannot simply tap your creative nature once and then expect to be done with it. It is a lifelong process: a continual commitment to being open to possibility, trusting your instincts, experimenting, taking risks, and revising.
— Fran Sorin, Digging Deep: Unearthing Your Creative Roots Through Gardening
All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.
— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Innovation basically involves making obsolete that which you did before.
— Jay Abraham, The Sticking Point Solution: 9 Ways to Move Your Business from Stagnation to Stunning Growth InTough Economic Times
To ask how I feel about writing is to ask how I feel about breathing.
— Shakirah Bourne, In Time of Need
When did most of us stop being poets?
— Michael St. George
Om meditation eliminates rigid and fixed views about the world. It creates a spacious, flexible and open views about the world.
— Amit Ray, Mindfulness Meditation for Corporate Leadership and Management
Creativity dies in an indisciplined environment.
— James C. Collins
We can’t turn our true selves off and on situationally and expect them to carry and sustain us. Rationing creativity results in bipolarism of the spirit. Our creativity is also our life force. When we turn it off and on like a spigot, we start to become less and less able to control the valve.
— S. Kelley Harrell
The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.
— Anthony Jay
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is saidIt was the dream itself enchanted me("The Circus Animal's Desertion")
— W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Respect is not creative ... Chanel is an institution, and you have to treat an institution like a whore — and then you get something out of her.
— Karl Lagerfeld
Books deliver information so that experience has a chance to exercise creativity.
— Richard Diaz
Igniting your creative potentials opens you up to new learnings and insights.
— Deborah Day
Indeed, very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the first phalange, the mesophalange, and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain. The fact is that the other organ which we call the brain, the one with which we came into the world, the one which we transport around in our head and which transports us so that we can transport it, has only ever had very general, vague, diffuse and, above all, unimaginative ideas about what the hands and fingers should do. For example, if the brain-in-our-head suddenly gets an idea for a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music or literature, or a clay figurine, it simply sends a signal to that effect and then waits to see what will happen
— José Saramago, The Cave
A lesson in bringing about true changes of mind and heart comes from a Japanese functionary. By day, he crunched numbers that showed his country was approaching imminent energy crisis and helped to craft policy. By night, he weaved a novel in which a bureaucrat-hero helps see the country through to new energy sources. When the crisis came faster than he expected, he actually put the novel away because he did not want to make the burden of his countrymen worse. When the short-term crisis passed, he published his novel. It's phenomenal and well-timed success fueled the vision that inspired difficult change and maintained a sense of urgency.
— Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
Of all the words that exist in any language only a bare minority are pure, unadulterated, original roots. The majority are "coined" words, forms that have been in one way or another created, augmented, cut down, combined, and recombined to convey new needed meanings, The language mint is more than a mint; it is a great manufacturing center, where all sorts of productive activities go on unceasingly.
— Mario Andrew Pei
She was an object lesson on the essential luck, whatever hardships may come their way, of those born able to make things.
— Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End
It was not the size of things that mattered but their perfection, it was not what one had that was important, but what one made.
— Elizabeth Goudge, A City of Bells
The dreamtime of creative work is a turnstile to eternity. (from Workbok)
— Steven Heighton
Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don’t let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, “honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.” Good to remember…
— Elif Shafak
Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.
— Stephen King, Danse Macabre
The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions.... [W]hen the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process. Although such conversations will occasionally be unpleasant—not everyone is always in the mood for small talk or criticism—that doesn’t mean that they can be avoided. The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks.
— Jonah Lehrer
We mustn't be afraid of inventing anything...Everething there is in us exists in nature. After all, we're part of nature. If it resembles nature, that's fine. If it doesn't, what of it? When man wanted to invent something as useful as the human foot, he invented the wheel, which he used to transport himself and his burdens. The fact that the wheel doesn't have the slightest resemblance to the human foot is hardly a criticism of it.
— Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso
I don't know who explained this rule to me; maybe it was the product of my own speculations and fantasies. That would have been typical: I was always inventing stories and machinations to make sense of things I didn't understand, and I understood almost nothing.
— César Aira
Oh God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning... No paragraph, no phrase even of the thousands the book must contain could strike a discordant note, be less than fully imagined, an entire novel's worth of thought would have to be expended on each one. His attention had only to lapse for a moment, between preposition and object, colophon and chapter heading, for dead spots to appear like gangrene that would rot the whole. Silkworms didn't work as finely or as patiently as he must, and yet boldness was all, the large stroke, the end contained in and prophesied by the beginning, the stains of his clouds infinitely various but all signifying sunrise. Unity in diversity, all that guff. An enormous weariness flew over him. The trouble with drink, he had long known, wasn't that it started up these large things but that it belittled the awful difficulties of their execution. ("Novelty")
— John Crowley, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now
Should he make a note? He felt for the smooth shape of his pen in his pocket. 'Theme for a novel: The contrary pull ... " No. If this notion were real, he needn't make a note. A notion on which a note had to be made would be stillborn anyway, his notebook was a parish register of such, born and dead on the same page. Let it live if it can. ("Novelty")
— John Crowley, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now
Those who say there are no more original ideas need to get out of the way of those of us who are creating them.
— Steven Symes
Consciously or not, we feel and internalize what the space tells us about how to work. When you walk into most offices, the space tells you that it's meant for a group of people to work alone. Closed-off desks sprout off of lonely hallways, and in a few obligatory conference rooms a huge table ensures that people are safely separated from one another.
— David Kelley
It's never too late to create!
— Leena Ahmad Almashat, Harmony Letters
To be an artist was to have failure as your constant bedfellow.
— M. Thomas Gammarino, Big in Japan: A (Hungry) Ghost Story
She felt invisible shackles snaking around her wrists and ankles, took a deep breath and said..............
— Taylor Stevens, The Informationist
Humans are often credited with having real foresight, in distinction to the rest of biology which does not. For example, Dawkins compares the 'blind watchmaker' of natural selection with the real human one. 'A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection . . . has no purpose in mind'.I think this distinction is wrong. There is no denying that the human watchmaker is different from the natural one. We humans, by virtue of having memes, can think about cogs, and wheels, and keeping time, in a way that animals cannot. Memes are the mind tools with which we do it. But what memetics shows us is that the processes underlying the two kinds of design are essentially the same. They are both evolutionary processes that give rise to design through selection, and in the process they produce what looks like foresight.
— Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine
An idea that's BOLD is worthless until SOLD!
— Don  The Idea Guy Snyder, 100 Whats Of Creativity: Questions To Spark Your Creativity, Unmuck Your Mind, And Break Through Your Mental Blocks
All that remains of the garden city in our own day are traffic-free enclaves, islands in a sea of traffic where the pedestrian leads a legally protected by languishing existence, comparable to that of the North American Indians on their reservations...In reality the modern urbanist regards the city as a gigantic centre of production, geared to the efficient transport of workers and goods, to the accommodation of people and the storage of wares, to industrial and commercial activity. The rest, that is to say creativity, life, is optional and comes under the heading of recreation and leisure activities.
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
He had thrilled to his own power only in the throes of sex, when he didn't have the presence of mind to know that pleasure wouldn't last forever, and in the flush of freedom, when he was too innocent to know he wasn't free.Now he seized the power that came from that collision of sex with freedom called love.
— Steve Erickson, Arc d'X