Quotes about creativity
page 9

“The long, extended play sessions of my youth were essential to the creator I am today. It helped exercise those world-building and problem solving pathways in my brain, and in turn enabled access to those deep recesses of the creative mind. Like learning a second language, it sinks in more thoroughly when you start young.”

Walter Wick (1953) American photographer and creator of children's books

The Value Of Imaginative Play http://www.walterwick.com/blog/2015/10/13/floor-games (October 13, 2015)

Youth, World, Exercises, Problem

“The enormous amount of financial resources and creative energy that nations have spent on wars and weapons could have been redirected to curing deadly diseases, feeding the hungry, eliminating poverty, promoting art and culture, investing in renewable clean energy, and solving a host of other important challenges facing humanity.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

War, Disease, Art

“It’s always a joy to work with Spike. He creates an environment that’s wonderful for creativity. People leave their egos at the door and just we all come from different genres and different levels within the business. It’s kind of exciting to finally meet people like Common, John Cusack, Jennifer Hudson and work with them, and see what the flavors are. You know the most seasoned veterans, we always want to see what the young guys, the young crew, has to offer. If they learn something and if they bring something to the table or if they should just be written off.”

Wesley Snipes (1962) film actor, Martial artist, film producer

Wesley Snipes, Comic Con: Wesley Snipes On ‘Blade’ Marvel Talks, ‘The Player’ & Spike Lee http://deadline.com/2015/07/wesley-snipes-blade-comic-con-interview-blade-the-player-1201472733/, Deadline Hollywood, 9 July 2015

People, Guy, Business, Learning

“And I understand they are, in a sense, artists? That is to say, they understand the creative process, the sublimation of fact to symbol and the use of symbol to suggest emotion?”

Jack Vance book Space Opera

Source: Space Opera (1965), Chapter 8 (p. 65)

Understanding, Sense

“The hardest part of doing anything creatively is just getting up and doing. Once I get out of bed and get into my art room, I start painting. I'm there. And I'm doing it.”

Frances Bean Cobain (1992) American artist

" Frances Bean Cobain on Life After Kurt's Death: An Exclusive Q&A http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/frances-bean-life-after-kurt-cobain-death-exclusive-interview-20150408" (2015)

Art, Parting, Painting

“Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Source: Reflections on the Human Condition (1973), p. 62

“I'm totally applying assumed Creative Commons rights.”

Ryan North (1980) Canadian webcomic writer and programmer

Blog post http://www.livejournal.com/users/qwantz/32441.html

“I feel like when I work that is my time to express myself and to be creative and to really delve into somebody else’s mind, heart and psyche. That is my thing.”

Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) American actress, singer, and food writer

Interview with ShowBizSpy. http://web.archive.org/web/20091008013808/http://www.showbizspy.com/article/192774/gwyneth-paltrow-i-dont-care-that-my-kids-cant-watch-my-films.html (5 October 2009)

Feeling, Time, Heart

“In some form or other the rivalry of men will continue to be employed as an instrument of the general welfare. It is not important that the arrangements which currently are set down as the competitive system will endure. It is important that the spirit of competition shall be enhanced and not impaired. There must be an outlet for the creative urge, free play for the dynamic drive. In a society, as in the physical world, motion is inseparable from life.”

Walton Hale Hamilton (1881–1958) Yale Law Professor

Walton H. Hamilton (1957), The politics of industry, p. 168-69; as cited in: Arnold, Thurman. " Walton Hale Hamilton https://www.jstor.org/stable/794455." The Yale Law Journal 68.3 (1959): 399-400.

Life, Men, World

“You see," said my Teacher, "how little your words have done. So far as the Monarch understands them at all, he accepts them as his own — for he cannot conceive of any other except himself — and plumes himself upon the variety of 'Its Thought' as an instance of creative Power. Let us leave this God of Pointland to the ignorant fruition of his omnipresence and omniscience: nothing that you or I can do can rescue him from his self-satisfaction.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 20. How the Sphere Encouraged Me in a Vision

God, Understanding, Teachers

“What is imagination? Psychologists tell us that it is the plastic or creative power of the soul; but materialists confound it with fancy. The radical difference between the two, was however, so thoroughly indicated by Wordsworth, in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads, that it is no longer excusable to interchange the words. Imagination, Pythagoras maintained to be the remembrance of precedent spiritual, mental, and physical states, while fancy is the disorderly production of the material brain.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I, Chapter XI

Soul, Imagination

“If A is A, a philosopher should equal a philosopher. But that's not the way the cosmos works. Similar things set themselves apart from one another. …What's more, opposites are joined at the hip. Einstein says that most creative acts come from opposition. They come from pitting yourself against someone with another point of view. They come from the law of differentiation. And that was true of Aristotle and his law of identity, his law of noncontradiction, his construction for the base for A is A. Aristotle came up with his idea… to fling a finger in the face of another philosopher [Heraclitus]…”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

When a Frog is a River? Aristotle Wrestles Heraclitus
The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2012)

Law, Way, Idea

“I found that business life is full of creative original minds -along with the usual number of second-guessers, of course.”

John Brooks (writer) (1920–1993) American writer

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

Life, Business

“Since the Nazi era need never have happened, to say that he prophesised it is actually a belittlement of his creative achievement, and only one step up from saying that he caused the whole thing. But nobody could now read The Trial without thinking of the Soviet show trials, or the short works Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony without thinking of the death camps.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Franz Kafka', p. 344
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Death, Thinking, Reading

“The essential of painting is that something, that 'ethereal glue', that intermediary product which the artist secretes with all his creative being and which he has to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial stuff of the painting.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

Yves Klein, catalogue of exhibition in the Jewish Museum, New York 1967, p. 18
from posthumous publications

Secret, Painting

“Jesus once said that the dead should left to bury the dead (Luke 9:60). This shows no disrespect for the dead. It shows an awareness that there are some functions in society that will be well taken care of without Christians investing their creativity in those functions. Someone else, in meeting such needs, can make a stable living. Burying the dead is still one of the businesses in which you can make a stable living. There are other such services that we can count on society handling by itself. Leadership in government and business are among these. Let us reserve our limited creativity for functions that will not be taken care of if we do not to it.”

John Howard Yoder (1927–1997) 20th century American Mennonite theologian

Source: Radical Christian Discipleship (2012), p. 41

Business, Dead

“Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are laid waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever…. Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Act I
Uncle Vanya (1897)

Bird, Tree, Animals

“There was a certain creative excitement, expressed in glandular constrictions which he knew well.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“I follow the works of Iranian artists even now, sometimes in Paris or in New York and I am happy Iranian artists are still great. Whether they are men or women, they have always been great. Despite all the pressure and censorship inside the country, they haven't been able to stop the creativity of our artists. Some have to work underground, like in cinema, and sometimes their work has political messages, but the number of our artists now has definitely grown in comparison to the past.”

Farah Pahlavi (1938) Empress of Iran

Former queen of Iran on assembling Tehran's art collection http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/01/queen-iran-art-collection, The Guardian, (August 1, 2012). Interviews

Women, Men, Happiness, Past

“They made a good team. As a matter of fact their talents were not too far apart; the artist is two-thirds artisan and the artisan has essentially the same creative urge as the artist.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Sixth Column

Source: Sixth Column (1949; originally serialized in 1941), Chapter 5 (p. 68)

“I've tried to stay true to myself this whole entire time, and I think I've represented myself as creatively as I could with what I got on the show.”

Blake Lewis (1981) American musician

["Blake Lewis Reaches Out to Gnarls, will.i.am After 'Idol' Finale: 'Call Me!'", http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1560387/20070524/id_0.jhtml, 2007-06-10, May 24, 2007], MTV.com, Katie Byrne, Jim Cantiello]
In interviews

Thinking, Time

“Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3 (p. 20)

Life, Happiness, Help

“Never underestimate the power of spiritual expression. It is the power of fusion, bringing and holding all things together in the true design in the creative process.”

Martin Cecil, 7th Marquess of Exeter (1909–1988) Marquess of Exeter

The Third Sacred School, Volume 7, Chapter 80
As of a Trumpet, On Eagle's Wings, The Third Sacred School

“Having spent a lifetime analyzing the game of chess and comparing the capacity of computers to the capacity of the human brain, I've often wondered, where does our success come from? The answer is synthesis, the ability to combine creativity and calculation, art and science, into a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts. Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind, and are then refined and improved by experience.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

Opening Gambit, Why Chess?, p. 4
2000s, How Life Imitates Chess (2007)

Art, Game, Science, Success

“Changing things is central to leadership. Changing them before anyone else is creative leadership”

Ordway Tead (1891–1973) American academic

Recently often attributed to Ordway Tead.
Attributed to Antony Jay in older sources, see: Public Administration Review (1977). Vol. 15. p. 20.
Also called "Jay's Laws of Leadership", see: Paul Dickson (1999) The official rules and explanations. p. 33. This source states:
Jay's Laws of Leadership
#Changing things is central to leadership, and changing them before anyone else is creativeness.
#To build something that endures, it is of great importance to have a long tenure in office-to rule for many years. Quick success can be achieved in a year or two, but nearly all great tycoons have continued their building much longer.
Disputed

Change

“I bring out an engineer, everything fits into a suitcase and we just record. I have so much spare time during that day that it makes sense to utilize it to do something creative like that, as opposed to just sitting around the hotel and sightseeing or something.”

Bryan Adams (1959) Canadian singer-songwriter

Adams tells Billboard.com that he recorded the new songs for "Room Service" in hotel rooms and other locales while on the road. Billboard.com http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003787034 (April 08, 2008). Url accessed on December 15, 2008

Sense, Time

“While it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from religious or moral considerations, those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with the truly religious conviction that this universe of ours is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge. If this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one and if those searching for knowledge had not been inspired by Spinoza's Amor Dei Intellectualis, they would hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievements.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1940s, Religion and Science: Irreconcilable? (1948)

Search, Knowledge, Universe, Science

“If our commitment to remain an open society is one of the pillars of our nationhood, the other is our commitment to remain an open economy. An economy that guarantees the freedom of enterprise, respects individual creativity, and at the same time mobilizes public investment for social infrastructure and the development of human capabilities. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to suggest that these are the principles to which all countries will increasingly want to adhere. In relating to the world, we must never lose sight of this vital aspect of our Nationhood.”

Manmohan Singh (1932) 13th Prime Minister of India

As quoted in "Speech by Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh at India Today Conclave, New Delhi" http://www.mea.gov.in/Speeches-Statements.htm?dtl/2464/, Ministry of External Affairs (India) (25 February 2005) 2001-2005

World, Freedom, Time, Country

“The very being of music is created by cognitive attributions made by individual perceiving or conceiving imaginers, in individual acts of perceiving or conceiving--that, in fact, the only real music 'theory' IS the creative-intellectual transaction which ontologizes music itself.”

Benjamin Boretz (1934) American composer

from Meta-Variations: studies in the foundations of musical thought Red Hook, N.Y. : Open Space, 1995.

Music, Imagination

“Don't go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as creativity, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability–whether they are easily measured or not.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Attributed to Kenneth Boulding in: Ramage Magnus and Karen Shipp (2009) Systems Thinkers. p. 116
1990s and attributed

Optimism

“It is in the nature of a teenager to want to destroy. The destructive impulse is universal among children of all ages, rises to a peak of vividness, ingenuity and fascination in adolescence, and thereafter never entirely goes away. Violence and hatred, and the fear of our own inability to control them in ourselves, are a fundamental part of our birthright, along with altruism, creativity, tenderness, pity and love. It therefore requires an immense act of hypocrisy to stigmatize our young adults and teenagers as agents of deviance and disorder. It requires a policy of dishonesty about and blindness to our own histories, as a species, as a nation, and as individuals who were troubled as teenagers, and who will always be troubled, by the same dark impulses. It also requires that favorite tool of the hypocritical, dishonest and fearful: the suppression of constitutional rights.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Solitude and the Fortresses of Youth http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/opinion/13CHAB.html?ex=1397188800&en=e08e585ef55c305e&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND, New York Times (April 13, 2004)

Love, Children, Age, Fear

“Dying creatively is the hallmark of vivisystems.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

“It is enough to have been created, to have embodied for a moment the infinite and tumultuously creative spirit. It is infinitely more than enough to have been used, to have been the rough sketch for some perfected creation.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 164)

Perfection

“It is impossible to over-emphasize the importance of al-Jazari's work in the history of engineering. Until modern times there is no other document from any cultural area that provides a comparable wealth of instructions for the design, manufacture and assembly of machines… Al-Jazari did not only assimilate the techniques of his non-Arab and Arab predecessors, he was also creative. He added several mechanical and hydraulic devices. The impact of these inventions can be seen in the later designing of steam engines and internal combustion engines, paving the way for automatic control and other modern machinery. The impact of al-Jazari's inventions is still felt in modern contemporary mechanical engineering [2].”

Donald Hill (1922–1994) British historian and engineer

Donald Hill, Studies in Medieval Islamic Technology,; as cited in: Salim Al-Hassani. " 800 Years Later: In Memory of Al-Jazari, A Genius Mechanical Engineer http://muslimheritage.com/article/800-years-later-memory-al-jazari-genius-mechanical-engineer," at muslimheritage.com, 2015.

Way, History, Time, Wealth

“From New Orleans and the back roads of the Mississippi Delta to Harlem and Chicago, black musicians set enduring and distinctive standards for American creativity. The blues of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, the gospel of Mahalia Jackson, the jazz of Duke Ellington, and the soul of Marvin Gaye claim fans of all ages from around the world. The trumpeting genius of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie illustrate the exceptional musicianship so prominent in various genres of African-American music.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2001, Black Music (June 2001)

Age, World, Music, Soul

“Nationalism is a state of mind permeating the large majority of the people and claiming to permeate all its members; it recognises the nation-State as the ideal form of political organization and the nationality as the source of all creative cultural energy and economic well-being. The supreme loyalty of man is therefore due to his nationality, as his own life is supposedly rooted in and made possible by its welfare.”

Hans Kohn (1891–1971) American historian

Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, Macmillan, 1961 (p.16). Also quoted in Andrew Vincent, Modern Political Ideologies, Wiley, 2009 (p.318).

Life, People, Loyalty

“Creativity has this problem, sometimes it'll be liked, sometimes it won't. It's unfortunate that perhaps we expected something more popular from this music, and it isn't that. See, this is very subjective. You will find enough people who like that also, I think.”

Shahrukh Khan (1965) Indian actor, producer and television personality

From interview with Anshul Chaturvedi

People, Music, Problem, Thinking

“We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there's a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thought we'd have a bowel movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better.”

Douglas Coupland (1961) Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer

Generation X (1991)

Silence, Night

“If you want creative and successful children, resign yourself to jousting with rebels.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Cauldron (2007), Chapter 9 (p. 96)

Children, Success

“If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you'll abort it if you do. Be patient and you'll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Source: Time Enough for Love (1973)

Idea, Birth, Learning, Time

“I’m trying to transmit the visions of creativity and build institutions that are incredibly catalytic to their fields.”

Paul Allen (1953–2018) American inventor, investor and philanthropist

The New York Times: "Paul Allen’s Philanthropy Mirrors His Passions and Business Approach" https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/giving/paul-allens-philanthropy-mirrors-his-passions-and-business-approach.html (02 November 2015)

“By Suprematism I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling.”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

In 'The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism', 1926; trans. Howard Dearstyne [Dover, 2003, ISBN 0-486-42974-1], 'part II: Suprematism', p. 67
1921 - 1930

World, Art, Feeling

“This pursuit of security in the past, this attempt to find a haven in a fixed dogma and an organizational hierarchy as substitutes for creative thought and praxis is bitter evidence of how little many revolutionaries are capable of 'revolutionizing themselves and things,' much less of revolutionizing society as a whole. The deep-rooted conservatism of the People's Labor Party 'revolutionaries' is almost painfully evident; the authoritarian leader and hierarchy replace the patriarch and the school bureaucracy; the discipline of the Movement replaces the discipline of bourgeois society; the authoritarian code of political obedience replaces the state; the credo of 'proletarian morality' replaces the mores of puritanism and the work ethic. The old substance of exploitative society reappears in new forms, draped in a red flag, decorated by portraits of Mao (or Castro or Che) and adorned with the little 'Red Book' and other sacred litanies.”

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher

"Listen, Marxist!" (May 1969); also available in Post Scarcity Anarchism (1971).
Listen, Marxist!

People, Books, School, Past

“Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.”

Merlin Mann (1966) American blogger

Twitter http://twitter.com/#!/hotdogsladies/status/1371419261 Tweeting as @hotdogsladies

“Man is about to be an automaton; he is identifiable only in the computer. As a person of worth and creativity, as a being with an infinite potential, he retreats and battles the forces that make him inhuman.
The dissent we witness is a reaffirmation of faith in man; it is protest against living under rules and prejudices and attitudes that produce the extremes of wealth and poverty and that make us dedicated to the destruction of people through arms, bombs, and gases, and that prepare us to think alike and be submissive objects for the regime of the computer.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Points of Rebellion (1970), p. 32–33
Other speeches and writings

People, Faith, Thinking, Personality

“Creative children do not paint. They mess around. If they have to draw, creative children always end up being the ridiculous kind of child, who produces childern′s drawings Creative children wipe spinach round their gobs, that′s all. Any thing more that these crappy daubnings is the result of education-and before long we′re on a level with Paul Klee.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 51 (Ibid., p. 45.)

Children, Education, Drawing, Painting

“When the creative imagination sees new dreams rising above from imitation and maneuvers its works in its own manner, there Art springs.”

Laxmi Prasad Devkota (1909–1959) Nepali poet

कला र जीवन (Art and Life)
Art and Life

Dreams, Art, Imagination, Spring

“Creativity is not limited to people practising one of the traditional forms of art, and even in the case of artists, creativity is not confined to the exercise of their art. Each one of us has a creative potential, which is hidden by competitiveness and success-aggression. To recognize, explore and develop this potential is the task of the School. Creation – whether it be a painting, sculpture, symphony or novel – involves not merely talent, intuition, powers of imagination and application, but also the ability to shape material that could be expanded to other socially relevant spheres.”

Heinrich Böll (1917–1985) German author, novelist, and short story writer

Joseph Beuys and Heinrich Böll (1972), cited in: Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, exh.cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1979. p. 278.

People, School, Art, Exercises

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote of Joseph Beuys and Heinrich Böll (1972), as cited in Joseph Beuys, exh. cat., Caroline Tisdall, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1979. p. 278
1970's

People, School, Art, Exercises

“His heart and mind must be pure. He must put aside fornication—”
Sagitta chuckled. “Dear Father, sex is the ultimate creative power. Your faith’s rejection of that principle will be its downfall.”

Melinda M. Snodgrass (1951) American writer

Source: Queen's Gambit Declined (1989), Chapter 7 (p. 86)

Faith, Sex, Heart

“There is a radical difference between the Christian expectation of the resurrection of the dead and the Greek belief in the immortality of the soul.. . . Although Christianity later established a link between these two beliefs, and today the average Christian confuses them completely, I see no reason to hide what I and the majority of scholars consider to be the truth.. . . The life and thought of the New Testament are entirely dominated by faith in the resurrection.. . . The whole man, who is really dead, is brought back to life by a new creative act of God.”

Oscar Cullmann (1902–1999) French theologian

In the book Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?

Life, God, Truth, Faith

“"Elohim," the name for the creative power in Genesis, is a female plural, a fact that generations of learned rabbis and Christian theologians have all explained as merely grammatical convention. The King James and most other Bibles translate it as "God," but if you take the grammar literally, it seems to mean "goddesses." Al Shaddai, god of battles, appears later, and YHWH, mispronounced Jehovah, later still.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Genesis, p. 197
Everything Is Under Control (1998)

God, Learning, Appearance

“Would you define Good for me, Citizen Abbot?”
“Certainly. Good is that force within us which inspires men to acts of conformity and subservience. The worship of Good is essentially the worship of oneself, and therefore the only true worship. The self which one worships is the ideal social being: the man content in his niche in society, yet ready to creatively advance his status. Good is gentle, since it is a true reflection of the loving and pitying universe. Good is continually changing in its aspects, although it comes to us in the… You have a strange look on your face, young man.”

Robert Sheckley book The Status Civilization

“I’m sorry, Citizen Abbot. I believe I heard that sermon, or one very much like it.”
Source: The Status Civilization (1960), Chapter 27 (p. 115)

Love, Men, Universe, Change

“I believe natural beauty stimulates the creative mind and it’s no wonder the residents have always had an affinity to the arts. Growing up I was surrounded by music, dance, theater, literature and given my father owned and operated the only two cinema halls in town, I was a very popular kid on Saturdays when traditionally the two would flock to see the latest “flick” that was playing at either the Capitol Cinema or The Rink”

Erick Avari (1952) Indian actor

formerly a roller skating rink

Beauty, Art, Music, Literature

“The things we fear most in organizations - fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances - need not be signs ofan impending disorder that will destroy us. Instead, fluctuations are the primary source of creativity.”

Margaret J. Wheatley (1941) American writer

Source: Leadership and the New Science (1992), p. 19-20 as cited in: Michael C. Jackson (2000) Systems Approaches to Management. p. 77

Fear

“If one benighted class of men begins by assuming that whatever is, is right, [contemporary radicals] begin by assuming that whatever is, is wrong. Had we to decide between these two—and I hope I make it clear that I do not think we have to decide thus—the latter would appear more blasphemous than the former because it makes a wholesale condemnation of a creation which is not ours and which exhibits the marks of a creative power that we do not begin to possess. The intent of the radical to defy all substance, or to press it into forms conceived in his mind alone … is an aggression by the self which outrages a deep-laid order of things.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Up From Liberalism,” p. 142.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Men, Hope, Thinking, Appearance

“The woodcut is the most graphic of the printmaking techniques. Its practice demands much technical ability and interest. Kirchner's technical skill made woodcutting easy for him. Thus he came in a spontaneous way through the simplification necessary here to a clear style of representation. We see in his woodcuts, which constantly accompanied his creative work, the formal language of the paintings prefigured.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

de:Louis de Marsalle (pseudonym of Kirchner) Uber Kirchners Graphik, Genius 3, no. 2 (1921), p. 252-53; as quoted in 'The Revival of Printmaking in Germany', I. K. Rigby; in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings - Essays Vol 1.; published by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California & Prestel-Verlag, Germany, 1986, p. 52
1920's

Way, Painting

“But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his mere scepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

World, Religion, Feeling, Universe

“I have always said that you do not see a thing until you look away from it. In other words, an object or a fact in nature has not become itself until it has been projected in the realm of the imagination. Therefore what has been retained in the mind’s eye is what lives. I have seldom or never worked from nature for this reason and so what I see is what I believe to be true, and that becomes the truism of the creative artist.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

Is Art necessary?, unpublished essay, 1942, Hartley Archive, Yale University; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 151
1931 - 1943

Imagination, Nature

“Therefore THE IDEA OF 'ARTISTIC WORK' MUST BE ABOLISHED AS A COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY CONCEPT OF WHAT IS CREATIVE and work must be accepted as one of the functions of the living human organism in the same way as the beating of the heart or the activity of the nerve centers, so that it will be afforded the same protection.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1915 - 1925, Suprematism' in World Reconstruction (1920)

Way, Idea, Heart

“We believe that to Christ belongs creative power — that "without Him was not any thing made which was made." We believe that from Him came all life at first. In Him life was as in its deep source. He is the fountain of life. We believe that as no being comes into existence without His creative power, so none continues to exist without His sustaining energy. We believe that the history of the world is but the history of His influence, and that the centre of the whole universe is the cross of Calvary.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 56.

Life, World, History, Universe

“Being an artist is being an isolated individual. But the development of the creative foundation of the encumbers the individual artists more and more with the prevailing problems. You are of your time whether you like it or not. Developing ones foundation to an artist means continually revising it. The artistic formulae wear thin quickly and yet daily the artist — when developing his own foundation — must enter his own time and the problems of other contemporary artists. Paths cross and the soil of time is starting to be turned.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

Quote in the late 1960s, as cited in Asger Jorn (2002) by Arken Museum of Modern Art, p. 28
1959 - 1973, Various sources

Problem, Time

“Mathematics is too arduous and uninviting a field to appeal to those to whom it does not give great rewards. These rewards are of exactly the same character as those of the artist. To see a difficult uncompromising material take living shape and meaning is to be Pygmalion, whether the material is stone or hard, stonelike logic. To see meaning and understanding come where there has been no meaning and no understanding is to share the work of a demiurge. No amount of technical correctness and no amount of labour can replace this creative moment, whether in the life of a mathematician or of a painter or musician. Bound up with it is a judgement of values, quite parallel to the judgement of values that belongs to the painter or the musician. Neither the artist nor the mathematician may be able to tell you what constitutes the difference between a significant piece of work and an inflated trifle; but if he is not able to recognise this in his own heart, he is no artist and no mathematician.”

Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) American mathematician

Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (1964)

Life, Mathematics, Understanding, Heart

“Theism (whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim) holds that God by wisdom created the world. The origin of the world and its subsequent ordering thus results from the designing activity of an intelligent agent—God. Naturalism, on the other hand, allows no place for intelligent agency except at the end of a blind, purposeless material process. Within naturalism, any intelligence is an evolved intelligence. Moreover, the evolutionary process by which any such intelligence developed is itself blind and purposeless. As a consequence, naturalism makes intelligence not a basic creative force within nature but an evolutionary byproduct. In particular, humans (the natural objects best known to exhibit intelligence) are not the crown of creation, not the carefully designed outcome of a purposeful creator, and certainly not creatures made in the image of a benevolent God. Rather, humans are an accident of natural history.”

William A. Dembski (1960) American intelligent design advocate

[The design revolution: answering the toughest questions about intelligent design, Downers Grove, Ill., InterVarsity Press, 2003, [BS652.D46, 2004], 2003020589, 9780830832163, http://books.google.com/books?id=sKVqpXqE0VwC] p. 8-9
2000s

Wisdom, God, World, History

“A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson English Traits

English Traits, Aristocracy
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“America must be voluntarily chosen by its new citizens, or it will not represent their aspirations or satisfy their needs. The greater the freedom given for creative impulse and variation in expression, the richer will be the resultant American life. And in the future American ideals will have to be both more exalted and more practical than in the past, and its life will have to square more generally with them, because the lands from which these peoples come will be free from the yoke of oppression. Democracy being free for the world, they may then realize in many lands the dreams which to them once made America the only land where such dreams could come true.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life, People, World, Dreams

“Any such material, received through the board, through automatic writing, or voice communication, should be carefully studied. Generally speaking, if your messages claim to originate from famous dead personalities, you can discount them as valid information. In all probability, they are creative fabrications of your own personal subconscious.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: How To Develop Your ESP Power (1966), p. 31

Communication, Study, Personality, Dead

“I was born near a station. The first things that I saw in my life were the moving locomotives and trains, and I drew them as a three-year-old. Perhaps it is because of this that observations of movement are my impetus for my inspiration to create. Out of this I receive a creative experience of life, which is the source of creativity.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

Kirchner had been inspired by movement and trains his whole life. He painted a. o. 'Nollendorfplatz' in West Berlin https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ernst_Ludwig_Kirchner_-_Nollendorfplatz.jpg - it was one of the stops on the first electrical tram (Straßenbahn) in 1896, according to 'Lexicon der Berliner Stadtentwicklung'. Berlin, 2002. The Underground (Untergrundbahn) followed in 1902, also with a stop at 'Nollendorfplatz' undated Source: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: ein Künstlerleben in Selbstzeugnissen, Andreas Gabelmann; Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, Germany 2010, p. 17 (transl. Claire Albiez)

Life, Training

“When you're in the middle of nowhere and you see something moving in the jungle, you're forced to become a creative problem solver.”

Bob Parsons (1950) United States Marine

Forbes: GoDaddy Billionaire Founder Bob Parsons On His Passion For Golf And Motorcycles https://www.forbes.com/sites/monteburke/2017/10/18/godaddy-billionaire-founder-bob-parsons-on-his-passion-for-golf-and-motorcycles/ (18 October 2017)

Problem

“One of the things that characterize my schooling from the early grades on up to university and apparently is still with us because I heard it on the radio this morning, was the idea that all bacteria are bad and that the scientific ideal is a germ free, bacteria free world. Of course, such a world would mean death. And yet, we are actually told now that by 1990 we will have such a sterile world that milk itself being rendered totally sterile, will sit on a table and will never spoil. In such a world not only bacteria will be gone, but man also. Such a world and such a science represents a travesty on God’s creative purpose.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Hybridization and the Law (n. d.)

Death, God, World, School

“As a graduate student at Yale, I studied the whole of Christian theology but focused my attention on the Darwinian controversies. I wanted to get to the root of the conflict between Darwinian evolution and Christian doctrine. In the course of my research I learned (to my surprise) that biblical chronology played almost no role in the 19th- century controversies, since most theologians had already accepted geological evidence for the age of the earth and re-interpreted the days in Genesis as long periods of time. Instead, the central issue was design. God created the cosmos with a plan in mind. This affirmation is among the most basic in all of Christianity (and other theistic religions as well, including Unificationism). And that plan included human beings as the final outcome of the creative process: we are created in the image of God.”

Jonathan Wells (1942) American intelligent design advocate

Darwinism: Why I Went for a Second Ph.D http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Talks/Wells/DARWIN.htm

God, Age, Religion, Study

“The military mind remains unparalleled as a vehicle of creative stupidity.”

Isaac Asimov book In Memory Yet Green

In Memory Yet Green (1979), p. 461
General sources

Stupidity

“Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 18

Art

“You must warn people not to make the intellect their God. The intellect knows methods but it seldom knows values, and they come from feeling. If one doesn't play a part in the creative whole, he is not worth being called human. He has betrayed his true purpose.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 135

God, People, Feeling, Parting

“A line cannot control pictorial space absolutely. A line may flow freely in and out space, but cannot independently create the phenomenon of push and pull necessary to plastic creation. Push and pull are expanding and contracting forces which are activated by carriers in visual motion. Planes are the most important carriers, lines and points less so... the picture plane reacts automatically in the opposite direction to the stimulus received; thus action continues as long as it receives stimulus in the creative process. Push answers with pull and pull with push. … At the end of his life and the height of his capacity Cézanne understood color as a force of push and pull. In his pictures he created an enormous sense of volume, breathing, pulsating, expanding, contracting through his use of colors.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 44
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Life, Color, Sense

“Who is Gloria Estefan today? I'm very fulfilled as a woman. I've been able to have a wonderful family life, a fantastic career. I have a lot of good friends around me. My family has been my grounding point, and rooted me deeply to the earth... I'm very happy. I've done everything I ever wanted to do. The key to me was -- I told my husband when we were in our 20s -- I'm going to work really hard, so one day I won't have to work so hard. And to me what that was, was having choices. And I do have choices now -- and I have take full advantage of that. It's important for me now to be here for my little girl [Emily, age 12]. My son is full grown -- and I know have quickly that goes. So, I'm balancing being a mother -- which to me is the most important role I have on this earth -- and still being creative, writing -- which is what I love to do. So, I've been able to branch out into not just writing songs like you have heard through the years -- but writing children's books, writing a screenplay. But at my core that's what I am: a writer. And that's what I enjoy doing behind the scenes: writing the songs for albums, recording it. And that's why you have seen me take more of a back seat to being the center of attention, and being out on tour and doing that kind of thing. I've stepped up a lot of my charity work. This year, the five concerts I did were all for charity: different ones and my own foundation. So, that's becoming a bigger and bigger part of my life -- as I wanted it to be. And [I keep] just growing and evolving.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

iTunes interview (released June 2, 2007)
2007

Love, Life, Happiness, Children

“I find it quite difficult to watch the film once it is done, because in your head or imagination it is totally different. In the beginning it is quite hard, and I don't mean hard as in a negative or a positive. It is difficult to see the film being edited and see the real images for the first time coming out of your head and onto the screen. Sometimes you are surprised that he left something in and he took something out. The director is the creator; he's the captain of the ship when it comes to the creative journey of the film, along of course with the producer. So when you start out acting you have to find a way to understand and to deal with that. But as I say I don't mean it as a negative or a positive.”

Marwan Kenzari (1983) Dutch Tunesian actor

Fight Cub: Marwan Kenzari and Nasrdin Dchar Talk Wolf http://thequietus.com/articles/16646-wolf-kenzari-dchar-interview (November 8th, 2014)

Way, Imagination, Understanding, Time

“Ambiguity: the bastard child of creativity and cowardice.”

Yahia Lababidi (1973)

Signposts to Elsewhere (2008)

“If thou wouldst have humanity advance, buffet all preconceived ideas. Thought thus smitten awakes and becomes creative. Otherwise it rests in a mechanical repetition and mistakes that for its right activity.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)

Idea

“Creative people have to be fed from the divine source.”

Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961) Swedish diplomat, economist, and author

Johnny Cash, in an interview for The Academy of Achievement (25 June 1993) http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/cas0int-3 Misattributed

People

“Language, intelligence, and humor, along with art, generosity, and musical ability, are often described as human equivalents of the peacock’s tail. However, peacocks afford a poor analogy for the role of courtship displays in humans. Other animal models offer a better fit. In a number of nonhuman species — species as diverse as sea dragons and grebes — males and females engage in a mutual courtship “dance,” in which the two partners mirror one another’s movements. In Clark’s grebes and Western grebes, for instance, the pair bond ritual culminates in the famous courtship rush: The male and female swim side by side along the top of the water, with their wings back and their heads and necks in a stereotyped posture. If we want a nonhuman analogue for the role of creative intelligence or humor in human courtship, we should think not of ornamented peacocks displaying while drab females evaluate them. We should think instead of grebes engaged in their mating rush or sea dragons engaged in their synchronized mirror dance. Once we have one of these alternative images fixed in our minds, we can then add the proviso that there is a slight skew such that, in the early stages of courtship, men tend to display more vigorously and women tend to be choosier. However, this should be seen as a qualification to the primary message that intelligence, humor, and other forms of sexual display are part of the mutual courtship process in our species.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 160

Women, Men, Art, Music

“Ludwig's book is outstanding. It pulls together a mound of pertinent data, much of it new, into coherent patterns…Throughout the book the reader is offered a wealth of insights and serious questions…Ludwig's development of a Creative Achievement Scale [is] a valued contribution in its own right, allowing researchers a comprehensive objective tool for scoring subjects' degree of achievement… Ludwig has cleared up much of the confusion and opinionated muddleheadedness… that has been attached to the topic and the thinking regarding a relationship between psychopathology and creativity.”

Arnold M. Ludwig

Imagination, Cognition and Personality, review of The Price of Greatness.

Books, Question, Thinking, Wealth

“But Watson had one towering advantage over all of them: in addition to being extremely clever he had something important to be clever about. This is an advantage which scientists enjoy over most other people engaged in intellectual pursuits, and they enjoy it at all levels of capability. To be a first-rate scientist it is not necessary (and certainly not sufficient) to be extremely clever, anyhow in a pyrotechnic sense. One of the great social revolutions brought about by scientific research has been the democratization of learning. Anyone who combines strong common sense with an ordinary degree of imaginativeness can become a creative scientist, and a happy one besides, in so far as happiness depends upon being able to develop to the limit of one's abilities.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

1960s, Lucky Jim, 1968

Happiness, People, Imagination, Sense

“Shakespeare is the Spinosistic deity — an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakspeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed, — epigrams with the point every where; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

12 May 1830
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Feeling, Horse

“… "folk art" signifies the poetical, musical, and pictorial activities of those strata of the population which are uneducated and not urbanized or industrialized. It is of the essence of this art that those who keep it in being are not only passively receptive, but normally are creative participants in the artistic activities, and yet do not stand out as individuals or claim any personal authorship of the productions. "Popular art" on the other hand is to be understood as artistic or quasi-artistic production for the demand of a half-educated public, generally urban and inclined to mass-behavior. In folk art, producers and consumers are hardly distinguished, and the boundary between them is always fluid; in the case of popular art, we find on the contrary an artistically uncreative, completely passive public, and professional production of artistic goods strictly in response to the demand for them. It is indeed a striking fact that folk art, especially folk-poetry, emerges from the ranks of those who enjoy it, whereas popular songs—the street-ballads and popular "hits"—derive from professionals belonging to and spiritually dependent upon the upper classes.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Arnold Hauser (1985). The philosophy of art history. p. 279

Education, Art, Music, Behavior

“Thinking of Melville, thinking of Poe, thinking of Mark Twain and Vachel Lindsay, thinking of Jack London and Tom Wolfe, one begins to feel there is almost no way of becoming a creative writer in America without being a loser.”

Nelson Algren (1909–1981) American novelist, short story writer

"Algren at the height of his success" in 1950, quoted by Richard Flanagan, 2005.
Nonfiction works

Way, Feeling, Thinking, Wolf

“We’ve never had more energy, more creativity or more talent in our caucus, do expectations sometimes get raised to a level that we maybe can’t meet? Sure. But we will always be willing to take on that challenge to do things like we did today in overriding the Governor. I think we need some of these ad hoc committees to create public policy that is driven by our caucus, our caucus needs to be crafting and riving policy, not the people paid to hang around in these hallways.”

Todd Richardson (1976) American politician

Richardson to run for Floor Leader with overwhelming caucus support https://themissouritimes.com/10690/richardson-run-floor-leader-overwhelming-caucus-support/ (May 6, 2014)

People, Thinking

“I really thought I could give it up… But I really love music, and having a creative outlet is really the best thing you can do for yourself.”

Edie Brickell (1966) singer from the United States

"Whatever happened to Edie Brickell?" CNN.com (7 January 2004) http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Music/01/07/music.edie.brickell.ap/

Love, Music

“In the current struggle I see the antiquated forces of fascism on one side, and on the other, those of the people, whose immense creative resources will give Spain a drive that will amaze the world.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

1961 and later
Source: Revelations', Luis Permanyer, April 1978; as quoted in Calder Miró, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 81 note 10

People, World

“If the colleges were better, if they … had the power of imparting valuable thought, creative principles, truths which become powers, thoughts which become talents, — if they could cause that a mind not profound should become profound, — we should all rush to their gates: instead of contriving inducements to draw students, you would need to set police at the gates to keep order in the in-rushing multitude.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

The Celebration of Intellect (1861)

Truth, Drawing

“We are going to change the [GNU] Free Documentation License in such a way that Wikipedia will be able to become licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. And so this is not, as some people speculated on Facebook my 50th birthday party. This is a party to celebrate the liberation of Wikipedia.”

Jimmy Wales (1966) Wikipedia co-founder and American Internet entrepreneur

Announcing that the Wikimedia Foundation Board has voted to enable Wikipedia to be licensed under a Creative Commons license. "Wikipedia to be Licensed Under Creative Commons" (30 November 2007) http://blog.jamendo.com/index.php/2007/12/01/breaking-news-wikipedia-switches-to-creative-commons/

People, Way, Birthday, Change