It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.
Quotes About Creativity
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.
To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.
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.
Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
— The Critic as Artist
You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of your imagination. You may not see your ears, but they will be there.
— The Mysterious Stranger
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
— Intellectual Autobiography: Ideas on Literature, Philosophy and Religion
— Why I Write
Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.
— The Captive & The Fugitive
Even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the mind of man. Science has liberated the ideas of those who read and reflect, and the American example has kindled feelings of right in the people.
— Letters of Thomas Jefferson
In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
— Postscript to the Name of the Rose
…the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
— What Do You Care What Other People Think?
The dreams we imagine when we are asleep should not in any way make us doubt the truth of the thoughts we have when we are awake.
— Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy
You can imprison a man, but not an idea. You can exile a man, but not an idea. You can kill a man, but not an idea.
— Daughter Of Destiny: An Autobiography
A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.
— The Memoirs of Catherine the Great
The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth.
A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.
An idea is salvation by imagination
You have many years ahead of you to create the dreams that we can't even imagine dreaming. You have done more for the collective unconscious of this planet than you will ever know.
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
I only hope that we don't lose sight of one thing - that it was all started by a mouse.
Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.