QUOTATIONS ON CREATIVITY/CREATIVE PROCESS

NOTE:  This collection of quotations come from various sources over an extended period of time.  Careful reading evidences the many facets of the creative process through this encounter with creative minds.  The quotations are listed alphabetically according to the individual's last name.

Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation profoundly affecting the roots of human spirit.   Ansel Adams

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.  Theodore Adorno

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.  Brian Adliss

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative, and that is all there is to it.   Edward Albee

I am so full of my work, I can’t stop to eat or sleep, or for anything but a daily run.   Louisa May Alcott

The creative person wants to be a know-it-all.  He wants to know about all kinds of things:  ancient history, nineteenth-century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures.  Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea.  It may happen six minutes later or six months, or six years down the road.  But he has faith that it will happen. Carl Ally

Extraordinary talent, personality, and cognitive ability do not seem to be enough—it's the labor of love that determines creativity.  Teresa Amabile

Creativity is in each one of us.  That is to say, creativity was in each one of us as a small child.  In children creativity is a universal.  Among adults it is almost non-existent.  The great question is:  What has happened to this enormous and universal human resource?  This is the question of the age. Harold H. Anderson

The essential ingredient for creativity is wasting time.    Anonymous

The creative process involves getting input, making a recommendation, getting critical review, getting more input improving the recommendation, getting more critical review…again and again and again.  Anonymous

Art completes what nature cannot bring to a finish.  The artist gives us knowledge of nature's unrealized ends.   Aristotle

What we play is life.  Louis Armstrong

The lash may force men to physical labor, it cannot force them to spiritual creativity.   Sholem Asch

There’s no such thing beneath the heavens as conditions favorable to art.  Art must crash through or perish.  Sylvia Ashton-Warner

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.  W.H. Auden

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.  Francis Bacon 

All rising to a great place is by a winding stair.  Roger Bacon

When I start work, I have a total vision of the final work—this vision lasting but a second.  Maurice Béjart, Choreographer

Each painting has its own way of evolving….  When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.  William Baziotes 

The concepts of discipline, responsibility, and commitment, enduring attention are all too often left out of account in descriptions of the creative process, simply because what so often first impresses us in the personality of the creative artist is unconventionality, self-assertiveness, independence of judgment, impulsive, a skipping wit, and a tendency to take lightly what most of the rest of us are wont to take seriously.   Frank Barron

The creative individual not only respects the irrational in himself, but courts the most promising source of novelty in his own thought….  The creative person is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, crazier and saner, than the average person.    Frank Barron

Creation is only the projection into form of that which already exists.  Shrimad Bhagavatam

I myself do nothing.  The Holy Spirit accomplished all through me.  William Blake
   
I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.  William Blake

Imagination rules the world.   Napoleon Bonaparte

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.  Edward De Bono

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.   Edward De Bono

In the broadest measure, any activity in which people engage is a creative one, whether it be in the terms that are commonly understood as being creative, whether composing or painting or writing, or engaging in a profession or craft such as dentistry or plumbing.  So that I think the creative act is in one which we are all involved in one way or another. , evn those who are indolent may be said to be creative in their indolence.  Whether out of choice or out of necessity, there is a certain amount of creativity that one has to bring to every aspect of life.  Therefore, I don’t think there’s an unbridgeable gulf between music composition as a creative endeavor and writing about musical composition, i.e., music criticism.  Martin Bookspan, Coordinator of ASCAP, host, commentator, author.

Straight-away the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind's eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration.    Johannes Brahms

When I feel the urge I begin by appealing to my Maker….  I immediately feel vibrations which thrill my whole being….  In this exalted state, I see clearly what is obscure in my ordinary moods; then I feel capable of drawing inspiration from above as Beethoven did….  Those vibrations assume the form of distinct mental images.  Johannes Brahms

I have to be in a semitrance condition to get such results—a condition when the conscious mind is in temporary abeyance, and the subconscious mind is in control.  Johannes Brahms

In the arts there are no A’s awarded for effort.   John Braine

When fantasy turns you on, you're obligated to God and nature to start doing it right away.   Stewart Brand

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.  Robert Bresson

The abilities that we have in the way of memory and imagination, of symbolism and emblem, are all conditioned by the sense of sight.  It is sight which dominates this kind of sequence, how we think of things that appear in the mind, and I come back to saying “visual,” “vision,” and “visionary”; “image,” “imagery,” “imagination,”….  We cannot separate the special importance of the visual apparatus of man from his unique ability to imagine, to make plans, and to do all the other things which are generally included in the catchall phrase “free will.”  What we really mean by free will, of course, is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them.  In my view…the central problem of human consciousness depends on the ability to imagine.  Jacob Bronowski, “The Mind As An Instrument for Understanding,” The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination

The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.    Van Wyck Brooks 

The good ideas are all hammered out in agony by individuals, not spewed out by groups.  Charles Browder

Creativity comes from trust.  Trust your instincts.  And never hope more than you work.   Rita Mae Brown

Once we push the gate of the mind slightly ajar and let the light stream in, the meaning of life becomes silently revealed to us.  The gate may be open, for one minute or for one hour, but in that period we discover the secret and neither weary time nor bitter woe can tear that priceless knowledge away from us….
Those of us who have taken this peep through the door of our own being, are dumbfounded.  We draw back, surprised, at the inscrutable possibilities of the Overself.  Man as a spiritual being possesses a capacity for wisdom which is infinite, a resource of happiness which is startling.      Paul Brunton

The human mind cannot create anything.  It produces nothing until after having been fertilized by experience and meditation; its acquisitions are the gems of its production.   Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon

The function of the creative artist consists of making laws, not in following laws already made.  Ferruccio Busoni

The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world.  The miracle of this flow may be represented in physical terms as a circulation of food substance, dynamically as a streaming of energy, or spiritually as a manifestation of grace.  Such varieties of image alternate easily, representing three degrees of condensation in the life force.  An abundant harvest is the sign of God’s grace; God’s grace is the food of the soul; the lightning bolt is the harbinger of fertilizing rain, and at the same time the manifestation of the released energy of God.  Grace, food substance, energy:  these pour into the living world, and wherever they fall, life decomposes into death.   Joseph Campbell (the lightning  bolt and the larger myth cycle of which it is a part is a code for the process of unlocking the creative life force)

It is better to create than to learn!  Creating is the essence of life.  Julius Caesar

I think that people who are not artists often feel that artists are inspired.  But if you work at your art you don’t have time to be inspired.  Out of the work comes the work.  John Cage

People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy.  The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.  Julia Cameron

Creativity is not and never has been sensible.  Julia Cameron

I have no idea when this tide comes, or where it goes, but when it begins to rise in my heart, I know that a story is in the offing.   Dorothy Canfield

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.   Frank Capra

During [these] periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual activity, the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce the sudden clarifying insights which give so much joy and delight.  Fritjof Capra (physicist)

Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist.  We are collaborators in creation.  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him. Rachel Carson

If you want to work on your art, work on your life.   Anton Chekhov

In my empty rooms are time and space.
I return to be myself
Unfretted and unfettered
In this self-like place. T’ao Ch’ien

To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits:  logic and common sense will only interfere.  But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.  Giorgio De Chirico

The creative arts are a natural and inevitable response to the basic human demands for significance, beauty, coherence, permanence, and design.  Taken collectively, they are an attempt to make sense and order out of the random clutter of human experience, to explore the resources of the human mind and body, to sensitize the discipline of imagination, to widen the range of human perception, and to create value where none existed before.  In less exalted language, the arts teach people to see, hear, feel, move, and act (in both senses of the term) as they concern themselves with the quality of life….
The time is probably past when American society can afford to be aesthetically illiterate or semi-literate.  Simply from the point of view of exterior appearance and the shape of the environment, the consequences of insensibility are staggering.  But more important than the social consequences of illiteracy are its effects on the quality of individual lives.
With the offspring of genius, the law of parturition is reversed:  the throes are in the conception, the pleasure is the birth.  Charles Caleb Colton

Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn’t know.  But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness. Aaron Copland

We must embrace the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion.  Cyril Connolly

Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.   Mary Lou Cook

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind.  If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.  We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.   Robert Cecil Day-Lewis

The painter's mind is a copy of the divine mind, since it operates freely in creating the many kinds of animals, plants, fruits, landscapes, countrysides, ruins, and awe-inspiring places.    Leonardo da Vinci

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.   Edger Degas

What is most real for me are the illusions I create in my paintings.  Everything else is quicksand.  Eugène Delacroix

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.  Eugène Delacroix

What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.  Eugène Delacroix

Finishing a painting demands a heart of steel: everything requires a decision, and I find difficulties where I least expected them.  Eugène Delacroix

The whole difference between construction and creation is this; that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.  Charles Dickens

It's like driving a car at night.  You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.   E.L. Doctorow

Creativity is essentially a lonely art.  An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing.  To others a curse.  It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea. Lou Dorfsman

There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.  Norman Douglas

In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions.  Marcel Duchamp

Songs are all written as part of a symphony.  Bob Dylan

The legs are the wheels of creativity.   Albert Einstein

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.  We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge.  Albert Einstein

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.  Albert Einstein

The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical.  It is the sower of all true science.  He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is good as dead.  Albert Einstein 

Any writer who says he doesn’t worry about fame, who says he has never, from time to time, gauged his success against that of other writers, is lying.  Sean Elder

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely …but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude….    Ralph Waldo Emerson
        
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.  Ralph Waldo Emerson

I guess when we become creative we move our lives onto a different energy flow or something.  Marnie Evans

Each of us is an artist, capable of conceiving and creating a vision from the depths of our being.   Dorothy Fadiman

Teach yourself by your own mistakes.  William Faulkner

I don't want life to imitate art.  I want life to be art.   Carrie Fisher

My work doesn’t exist separately from my life.  Richard Ford

My slow painting, I tell myself, is like life; you don’t know how it’s going to end.  But that doesn’t release you from choosing from moment to moment, from point to point.  Andrew Forge 

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.  He lets down, as it were, a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something that is normally beyond his reach.  He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.   E. M. Forster

When I’m operating at my best, my work is my prayer.  It comes out of the same place that prayer comes out of—the center, the heart.   Matthew Fox


Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.   Anna Freud

Most people die before they are fully born.  Creativeness means to be born before one dies.    Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.   Eric Fromm

What are the conditions of the creative attitude, of seeing and responding, of being aware and being sensitive to what one is aware of?  First of all, it requires the capacity to be puzzled.  Children still have the capacity to be puzzled….  But once they are through the process of education, most people lose the capacity of wondering, of being surprised.  They feel they ought to know everything, and hence it is a sign of ignorance to be surprised or puzzled by anything.  Erich Fromm 

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.   Buckminster Fuller

In beginning to throw pots, I worked for a long time to get the clay centered.  I soon discovered that if I were not centered myself, the clay would not become centered.   William Galbreath
   
A painting is never finished—it simply stops in interesting places.  Paul Gardner

Like an ability or a muscle, hearing your inner wisdom is strengthened by doing it.  Robbie Gass

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities.  Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.  José Ortego y Gasset

I shut my eyes in order to see.  Paul Gauguin

We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other peoples’ models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.  Shakti Gawain

Every time you don’t follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness.  Shakti Gawain

Creativity is dynamic, it asserts life, frees the human spirit, conquers mental lassitude and illness, and makes real the outrageous potential of the universal imagination.   Robert Genn

We try not to have ideas, preferring accidents.  To create, you must empty yourself of every thought.   Gilbert George

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.  Andre Gide

Because of their courage, their lack of fear, they (creative people) are willing to make silly mistakes.  The truly creative person is one who can think crazy; such a person knows full well that many of his great ideas will prove to be worthless.  The creative person is flexible—he is able to change as the situation changes, to break habits, to face indecision and changes in conditions without undue stress.  He is not threatened by the unexpected as rigid, inflexible people are. Frank Goble

To be creative, relax and let your mind go to work, otherwise the result is either a copy of something you did before or reads like an army manual.   Kenneth H. Gordon, Jr.

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.  And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.   Martha Graham

Great improvisers are like priests.  They are thinking only of their god.  Stéphan Grappelli

If people only knew what lies at the heart of my novels!  What a tumult of desires these carefully written pages conceal!  I sometimes have a loathing for the furious cravings that give me no peace except when I am working.  Julian Green

A sense of truth of poetry, of its supreme place in literature, had awakened in me.  At the risk of ruining all worldly prospects I dabbled in it…was forced out of it….  It came back upon me….  All was of the nature of being led by a mood, without foresight, or regard to whither it led.   Thomas Hardy

You can have no recipe with art.  If you follow a recipe, you're negating the creative act.  Denise Hare

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes it visible.  The moon develops creativity as chemicals develop photographic images.  Norma Jean Harris

I cannot expect even my own art to provide all of the answers—only to hope it keeps asking the right questions. Grace Hartigan

In order to [create], you must face your inner critics, steal their power.  Begin by trying to identify them.    Georgia Heard

The stuff comes alive and turns crazy on ya.   Ernest Hemingway

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.  That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of.  But what about all the reasons that no one knows?  Emily Hemingway

It seems safe to say the significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm.   Mary Henle

I so love carving.  It seems to me to be the most rhythmic and marvelous way to work on living, sensuous material.   Barbara Hepworth   

The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.  Robert Henri 

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life.  There are as many solutions as there are human beings.   George Tooker Henry

Creation is letting something be where before there was nothing…   Albert Hofstadter

I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years.  If you can, then it ain’t music ; it’s close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.  Billie Holiday

Every problem of humankind will be solved by creative ideas from creative people.  It’s common sense.  But we have a problem, and it may be the most serious dilemma facing mankind today.  It can be stated very simply.  We, in education, are not nurturing creativity in our children—that God-given mechanism and ability.  This is a problem that touches every area of human endeavor.  This has been called, "The greatest failure of Western culture."

We watch helplessly as our children begin life as such jewels of curiosity, love, and sharing only to see their creativity become boxed in, less imaginative, subject to approval, less daring, and less wild.  These creatures, whom we can't get to bed at night because they are playing with their crayons and their blocks, shortly become concerned with marks and homework and whether it's the right answer and in the correct form.  We are destroying creativity.  And this is exacerbated in the school system.

Where do we turn?  Anthropology and history have investigated 5,000 societies, and in virtually every one, the priorities were set for the society to be involved in art, religion, and music.  More important, the priority is to teach these.  Our society is the one exception….

There is now available enough evidence on the psychological, neurological, and psychobiological levels to show that the arts and the creative process are important….  It is in doing art that one can discover self.  Art isn't simply important education; it is education.  Art is the gymnasium of the mind, body, and spirit.  It is the place where we can totally address every element of ourselves; it doesn't matter what the content is.  And creativity is the key.   Loren Hollander, concert pianist, in a speech before the Artist in education Coordinator's Conference, New Orleans, LA, October 1983.

No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.  Edward Hopper

Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?   Karen Horney

Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity.  Jean Houston

Creative activity is more than a mere cultural frill, it is a crucial factor of human experience, the means of self-revelation, the basis of empathy with others; it inspires both individualism and responsibility, the giving and the sharing of experience.  Tom Hudson

For me a painting is like a story which stimulates the imagination and draws the mind into a place filled with expectation, excitement, wonder and pleasure.  J.P. Hughston

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.   Victor Hugo

Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.   David Hume 

If the universe does not belong to me, to whom does it belong?  If I am not master of it, why am I not?  Eugene Ionesco

There are wonderful moments, those rare moments when there is silence, a tangible silence out there, a silence deeper than silence.  Derek Jacobi

Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.   William James

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.  The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.  C.G. Jung

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need.  The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it.  Now we could not live without it.  Louis Kahn

There is no must in art because art is free.  Wassily Kandinsky

The power, in which we must have faith if we would be well, is the creative and curative power which exists in every living thing.   John Kellogg

The power in which we must have faith if we would be well, is the creative and curative power which exists in every living thing.   John Kellogg

It is a profound human waste for people to go through life half-hearing, half-seeing, and only dimly aware of the range of their own perceptions and capabilities.  In this connection, it is both encouraging and sad to see the swarms of middle-aged people enrolling in adult classes in drama, dance, music, and visual arts.  It is encouraging because it demonstrates the hunger for self-expression and the demand for creative activity; it is sad because it often reflects years of frustration and cultural poverty.  J. Clark Kent

…the work of art…is above all a process of creation, it is never experienced as a mere product….  Paul Klee

Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void.  Ripe, graphic fruits fall off.  My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.  Paul Klee

Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know.  Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.   George Kneller

Creativity is harnessing universality and making it flow through your eyes.   Peter Koestenbaum

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.   Arthur Koestler

True creativity often starts where language ends.  Arthur Koestler

My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness for form.  Milan Kundera

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.  Edwin Land

The essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail.  Edwin Land

Creativity without implementation is irresponsibility. Ted Leavitt

Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style of system.  Bruce Lee

But unless we are creators, we are not fully alive.   Madeleine L'Engle

The important thing is that creation is God’s, and that we are part of it, and being part of creation is for us to be co-creator with [him] in the continuing joy of creation.  Madeleine L’Engle

Inspiration far more often comes during the work than before it because the largest part of the job of the artist is to listen to the work and to go where it tells him to go.  Madeleine L’Engle 

The artist must be obedient to the work….  Each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius or something very small, comes to the artist and says, ‘Here I am.  Enflesh me.  Give birth to me.’  And the artist either says, ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord,’ and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses. Madeleine L’Engle

Creativity can solve almost any problem.  The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.  George Lois

When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service of my vision—it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.  Andre Lorde

I have inside me an unchanging, undying need to be somebody else.  That, however, is paradoxically coupled with the unchanging desire to express myself. Lawrence Luckinbill

 …I used to sit and doodle and wish for so-called “inspiration,” and I was obsessed by superficial idioms about creativity, all the while never realizing that most of those idioms were invented by people who are not artists.  Since then, I’ve attempted to eliminate what I consider the falsehood about “inspiration.”  Creativity is also a matter of stamina.  Stamina for routine development of one’s work, stamina to keep on producing and creating systematically.  And the trouble with talent is, those who have it think they can get away with murder, and very often they are right.  Again, given the talent, it’s ultimately a question of how steadily you can keep on creating.  Rama Lurie, political cartoonist

The most salient mark of a creative person, the central trait at the core of his being is, as I see it, just this sort of courage.  It is not physical courage of the type that might be rewarded by the Carnegie Medal or the Congressional Medal of Honor, although a creative person may have courage of this kind, too.  Rather, it is a personal courage, a courage of the mind and spirit, psychological or spiritual courage that is the radius of a creative person:   the courage to question what is generally accepted; the courage to be destructive in order that something better can be constructed; the courage to be open to experience both from within and from without; the courage to imagine the impossible and try to achieve it; the courage to stand aside from collectivity and in conflict with it, if necessary; the courage to become and to be oneself.  D.W. MacKinnon,  “Creativity:  A Discussion at the Nobel Conference”

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist. Renè-François-Ghislain Magritte

Great art does not proceed from great criticism, but from great encouragement.  John Masefield

We are dealing with a fundamental characteristic, inherent in human nature, a potentiality given to all or most human beings at birth, which most often is lost or buried or inhibited as the person gets enculturated.  Abraham Maslow

It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.  R. Somerset Maugham

Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.  Rollo May    

Creative thinking is distinguished by the fact that there’s something novel about it.  Donald W. MacKinnon

To the extent a person makes, invents, or thinks something that is new to him, he may be said to have performed a creative act.  Margaret Mead

Experience, even for a painter, is not exclusively visual.  Walter Meigs

The artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience.  It produced a kind of intuitive of perception.  Thomas Merton

This, then, is the beginning: to know that we have a right to the creative and to follow it where it leads.  Why should that be so difficult?  We know things when we are very young that we forget as we age.  Deena Metzger

Sometimes the first minutes of writing are simply a process of priming the pump.  The act of sitting still with the blank page or of writing as a leap of faith is an offering, a gesture of sincerity that one makes to the creative unconscious.  Not always, but sometimes, after much discouragement, the writing gushes forth like a geyser from the center of the earth.    Deena Metzger

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what is next or how.  The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.  The artist never entirely knows.  We guess.  We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.  Agnes De Mille

Creation is a drug I can't do without.  Cecil B. De Mille

Writing is a voyage of discovery.  Henry Miller

Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing.  Henry Miller

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

What I am seeking, in fact, is a motionless movement, something equivalent to what is called the eloquence of silence, of what St John of the Cross meant, I believe, by dumb music.  Joan Miró  

A bit of thread can set a world in motion.  I start from something considered dead arrive at a world.  And when I put a title on it, it becomes even more alive. Joan Miró

Art class was like a religious ceremony for me.  I would wash my hands carefully before touching paper or pencils.  The instruments of work were sacred objects to me.  Joan Miró   

You've got to keep the child alive; you can't create without it.  Joni Mitchell

In the brush doing what it’s doing, it will stumble on what one couldn’t do by oneself.  Robert Motherwell

The position of the artist is humble.  He is essentially a channel.  Piet Mondrian

At a certain point, you have to go to the edge of the cliff and jump—put your ideas into a form, share that form with others.  Meridith Monk

The most potent music of all is our own inner child.  Stephen Nachmanovitch

The noun of self becomes a verb.  This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.  Stephen Nachmanovitch

Creative work is play.  It is free speculation using the materials of one’s chosen form.  Stephen Nachmanovitch

Poetry arrived in search of me.  I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river.  I don't know how or when…   Pablo Neruda

You cannot govern the creative impulse; all you can do is eliminate obstacles and smooth the way for it.  Kimon Nicolaides

The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition.  If one is something one really does not need to make anything—and one nonetheless does very much.  There exists above the "productive" man a yet higher species.  Friedrich Nietzsche

You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.  Friedrich Nietzsche

Nobody sees flower—really—it is so small it takes time—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.  Geogia O’Keeffe

Chance is always powerful.  Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.  Ovid

Dedication to your work is the only possible sanctification.  Cynthia Ozick

If I don’t practice for one day, I know it; if I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it; if I don’t practice for three days, the audience knows it.  Ignacy Paderewski
       
Thoughts give birth to a creative force that is neither elemental nor sidereal.  Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow.  When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven.  Philipus A. Paracelus

We must accept that this creative pulse within us is God’s creative pulse itself.  Joseph Chifton Pearce

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.  Joseph Chilton Pearce

Out of nothing can come nothing, and nothing can become nothing.  Persius 

All children are artists.  The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.  Pablo Picasso

I do not live to play, but I play in order that I may live, and return with greater zest to the labors of life.  Plato 

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy—the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.  Norman Podhoretz

The painting has a life of its own.  I try to let it come through.  Jackson Pollock

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.   Beatrix Potter

The music of this opera (Madama Butterfly) was dictated to me by God; I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and communicating it to the public. Giacomo Puccini

The conscious purposeful appropriation of one’s own soul-forces is the supreme secret….  I first grasp the full power of the Ego within me.   Then I feel the burning desire and intense resolve to create something worthwhile.  The desire, this longing, implies in itself the knowledge that I can reach my goal.  Then I make a fervent demand….  This perfect faith opens the way for vibration to pass from the dynamo which the soul center is, into my consciousness, and the inspired ideas are born.  Giacomo Puccini

An original is a creation motivated by desire.  Any reproduction of an original is motivated by necessity.  It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms.  To create is divine, to reproduce is human.  Man Ray

Be a good craftsman; it won’t stop you from being a genius.  Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Anyone who says you can’t see a thought simply doesn’t know art.  Wynetka Ann Reynolds

The unconscious wants truth.  It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.  Adrienne Rich

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.   M.C. Richards

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights:  without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition.  Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of.  Rainer Maria Rilke

I witness the breaking forth of my thought.  I watch them, I listen to them.   Jean Nicolas Rimbaud

Art?  You just do it.  Martin Ritt

The creative process is the emergence in action of a novel relational product, growing out of the uniqueness of the individual.  Carl Rogers

Art [categorized as all of the fine arts] is unique in human experience as a way of knowing and as a way of being.  The arts are primarily committed to the development of intelligent feeling.  …The arts are important to a child's education because they are a way of knowing in their own right and offer unique access to certain dimensions of human experiences….

Just as it is easier to teach the skills of medium control in the arts than it is to teach the skills of creativity, perception, and of composition, so it is easier to transfer educational freight from teacher to learner than it is to release the springs of self-motivation that bring in the prospect of personal knowledge.  …The commitment to expression, creativity, and imagination in education is simply the commitment to the principle of life-abundance—and all teachers have to be, as a qualification for their work, committed to that principle and expert in its practice.  And life-abundance is quintessentially the aesthetic principle embodied as "the art of living."  Malcolm Ross, in Aesthetics and the Arts

The world of reality has its limits; the world of the imagination is boundless.  Jean Jacques Rousseau

New organs of perception come into being as a result of necessity.  Therefore, O man, increase your necessity, so that you may increase your perception.  Jalai ud-Din Rumi

Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about….  Say yes quickly, if you know, it you’ve known it from before the beginning of the universe.   Jalai ud-Din Rumi

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.  Carl Sagan

Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Whatever course you have set for yourself, it will not be a chore but an adventure if you bring to it a sense of glory of striving, if your sights are set far above the merely secure and mediocre.   David Sarnoff

It is wise to learn; it is God-like to create.  John Saxe

Remember that as a creative person, the important thing is to create.  Who sees what you make, where it goes and what it does is a secondary consideration; the first is to exercise the talent God has given you.  Franky Schaeffer

The person who can combine frames of reference and draw connections between ostensibly unrelated points of view is likely to be the one who makes the creative breakthrough.  Denise Shekerjian

In the case of a 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 multitudes.  Friedrich von Schiller

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.  Ben Shahn

I have never seen such a great musician as that soloist.  He looked very ordinary, but there was some inner fire in him that felt like a volcano.  Ravi Shankar

Creativity is…seeing something that doesn’t exist already.  You need to find out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God.  Michele Shea

Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.  Gail Sheehy

One after another the greatest writers, poets, and artists confirm the fact that their work comes to them from beyond the threshold of consciousness.  Shelley 

If you start with something that’s false, you’re always covering your tracks.  Paul Simon

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.  Isaac Bashevis Singer

Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors.   W. Eugene Smith

You will write…If you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery.  Gertrude Stein

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom.  Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.   Saul Steinberg

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.  Robert Louis Stevenson
 
Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an after-life. Arianna Strassinopoulos

While the ideas were flowing in upon me—the entire musical, measure by measure, it seemed to me that I was dictated to by two wholly different Omnipotent Entities….  I was definitely conscious of being aided by more than an earthly Power, and it was responsive to my determined suggestions.  Richard Strauss

A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.  Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

The world speaks to me in colours, my soul answers in music.  Rabindranath Tagore

But how great was my astonishment when I heard him play with consummate skill a sonata of such exquisite beauty as surpassed the boldest flight of my imagination.  It felt enraptured, transported, enchanted; my breath was taken away, and I awoke.  Seizing my violin I tried to retain the sounds I had heard.  But it was in vain.  The piece I composed, The Devil’s Sonata, was the best I ever wrote, but how far below the one I had heard in my dream!  
Giuseppe Tartini, upon awakening from a dream that the devil had become his slave and played the violin handed to him.

If the poem is a real creation, it is a kind of knowledge that we did not possess before.  Allen Tate

Generally speaking, the germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly….  It takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches and leaves, and finally blossoms.  I cannot define the creative process in any way than by this simile….  I forget everything and behave like a mad man; everything within me starts pulsing and quivering; hardly have I begun the sketch, ere one thought follows another.  In the midst of this magic process, it frequently happens that some external interruption awakes me from my somnambulistic state….  Dreadful indeed are such interruptions….  They break the thread of inspiration.  Peter Tchaikovsky

The world is but a canvas to the imagination.  Henry David Thoreau

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams!  Live the life you’ve imagined.  As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.  Henry David Thoreau

Defining creativity is easy, about as easy as putting socks on an octopus, but somebody has to try because creativity is too important to individual fulfillment and societal survival to ignore.  Sidney W. Tiedt

All arts create symbols for a level of reality which cannot be reached in any other way.  A picture, a poem, [or a piece of music] reveals elements of reality which cannot be approached scientifically.  In the creative work of art, we encounter reality in a dimension which is closed for us without such works.  …such use of symbols not only opens dimensions and elements of reality, which otherwise would remain unapproachable, but also unlocks dimensions and elements of our soul, which correspond to the dimensions, and elements of reality.  Paul Tillich

It is within my power either to serve God or not to serve him.  Serving him, I add to my own good and the good of the whole world.  Not serving him, I forfeit my own good and deprive the world of that good, which as in my power to create.  Leo Tolstoy

It is highly significant, though generally neglected, fact that those creations of the human mind which have borne preeminently the stamp of originality and greatness, have not come from within the region of consciousness.  They have come from beyond consciousness, knocking at its door for admittance:  they have flowed into it, sometimes slowly as is if by seepage, but often with a burst of overwhelming power.  G.N.M Tyrell (The Personality of Man)

Why should we all use our creative power…?  Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.  …imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.  Brenda Ueland

Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.  Brenda Ueland

After a night spent in fever and sleeplessness I forced myself to take a long walk through the country.  It looked dreary and desolate.  Upon my return I lay down on a hard couch.  Sleep would not come, but I sank into a kind of somnolence, in which I suddenly felt as though I were sinking in swiftly flowing water.  The rushing noise formed itself into a musical sound, the chord of E flat major, whence developed melodic passages of increasing motion.  I awoke in sudden terror, recognizing that the orchestral prelude to Das Rheingeld, which must have been long lain latent within me, had at last been revealed to me.  I decided to return to Zurich at once and begin the composition of my great poem.  Richard Wagner

We are active creators who bring about the new, but our creativity is always in context.  Our conception of creativity has been changing and is changing without our even intending it; what we are valuing about creativity is therefore changing as well.  I believe that as our lives and our global ideology of creativity evolve, we will acknowledge more clearly both how much lies beyond creativity, and how creativity is our human drive toward the beyond.   Robert Paul Weiner

The things we fear most in organizations—fluctuations, disturbance, imbalances—are the primary sources of creativity.  Margaret J. Wheatley

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves, they find their own order…the continuous thread of revelation. Eudora Welty

Art happens—no hovel is safe from it, no prince can depend on it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.  James Abbott McNeill Whistler

Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique of history in a museum.  The creative explorer looks for history in a hardware store and fashion in an airport.  Robert Wieder

To the rationally minded the mental processes of the intuitive appear to work backwards.  Frances Wickes

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.  Oscar Wilde

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.  Virginia Woolf

A creative man is someone who can see inside and come out with something fresh, something vital.  Frank Lloyd Wright

Try?  There is no try.  There is only do or do not. Yoda speaking to Luke Skywalker in “The Empire Strikes Back”

Highly creative people don't necessarily excel in raw brainpower.  They are misfits on some level.  They tend to question accepted views and to consider contradictory ones.  G. Pascal Zachary

Creativity is a celebration of one's grandeur, one's sense of making anything possible.  Joseph Zinker

"If you can walk, you can dance.  If you can talk, you can sing!"   Saying from Zimbabwe

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I an artist, I will answer you:  "I am here to live out loud."  Emile Zola

When you’re in the theater, you must work incredibly hard.  Your life is regimented and you must store up your energy for that one burst of light.  Vera Zorina