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Quotation of the day
Friday, 21 November 2008
Daily Quote:
"There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American." (Twain, Mark - America)

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Proverb of the Day
All that glitters is not gold.
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Browse Quotations about Creativity

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.
A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.
A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstinting has been naught.
A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations.
All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives its final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.
All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself -- civilization, in a word is the fruits of the creative artist. It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape.
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty -- as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.
An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.
Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. The creative explorer looks for history in a hardware store and fashion in an airport.
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.
Creation is a drug I can't do without.
Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.
Creative power, is that receptive attitude of expectancy which makes a mold into which the plastic and as yet undifferentiated substance can flow and take the desired form.
Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.
Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.
Creativity comes from awakening and directing men's higher natures, which originate in the primal depths of the uni- verse and are appointed by Heaven.
Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.
Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.
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.
Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.
Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.
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.
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Genius is initiative on fire.
Had I been present at the creation of the world I would have proposed some improvements.
I do my best work when I am in pain and turmoil.
I do not seek, I find.
I have asked a lot of my emotions --one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something, not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.
I must create a system or be enslaved by another man s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.
I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.
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.
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 the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?
It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.
It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.
It is wise to learn; it is God-like to create.
It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm.
It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.
It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.
Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.
Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.
Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
One measure of how creative you are is how you respond to changes in your circumstances and environment. How flexible are you? Consider how water adapts to its environment: evaporation, condensation, snowflake, melting, flowing, goes around rocks, fills containers, etc.
One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
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.
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.
Out of nothing can come, and nothing can become nothing.
Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the
That which builds is better than that which is built.
The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.
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.
The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the creative is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.
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.
The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
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.
The essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail.
The good ideas are all hammered out in agony by individuals, not spewed out by groups.
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.
The lash may force men to physical labor, it cannot force them to spiritual creativity.
The legs are the wheels of creativity.
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.
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.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.
The things we fear most in organizations -- fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances -- are the primary sources of creativity.