Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them.
— Macbeth
Quotes About Creativity
At the kitchen counter with a leftover jar of olives and a half-empty bottle of wine, you tip both into the pasta sauce. That is creativity in its ordinary form: a small, practical willingness to try something new. It appears when a parent invents a bedtime story, when a mechanic improvises a fix.
Henry Ford said that teaching that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense. Martin Luther King Jr. said the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists. Pablo Picasso said others have seen what is and asked why, while he saw what could be and asked why not. Steve Jobs said you have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right, and if you are not passionate enough from the start, you will never stick it out.
Henry Ford said that teaching that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense. Martin Luther King Jr. said the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists. Pablo Picasso said others have seen what is and asked why, while he saw what could be and asked why not. Steve Jobs said you have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right, and if you are not passionate enough from the start, you will never stick it out.
There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!
— Schopenhauer as Educator
I do not play this instrument so well as I should wish to, but I have always supposed that to be my own fault because I would not take the trouble of practicing.
— Pride and Prejudice
To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.
— Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
As the story grew, it put down roots into the past and threw out unexpected branches .
— The Fellowship of the Ring
We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs.
— Authority and the Individual
Creation's probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.
— A Moveable Feast
Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.
— The Essential Rumi
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
— The Little Prince
On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
— Bouvard and Pecuchet
The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.
— The Mind on Fire: A Faith for the Skeptical and Indifferent
If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him, it lies in his power to create them, and if he wishes to see monstrosities that are frightful, ridiculous, or truly pitiable, he is lord and God thereof.
— Leonardo's Notebooks
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.
— The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.
— The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.
— Pablo Picasso: Metamorphoses of the Human Form : Graphic Works, 1895-1972
Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.
— Death in Venice and Other Tales
The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain.
— My Inventions
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.
— The Parliament of Birds
We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes.
To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.
You are not here merely to making a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement.
It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.
You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.
I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.