quotes and passages on creativity

creativity 2 - creativity 3 - imagination - art

You were placed on this earth
to create, not to compete.

Robert Anthony

Creative power has to filter through our beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and habits. The more negative and constricted our beliefs and patterns are, the more they block the creative energy. Most people hope that by ignoring negativity, it will go away, but the reverse is actually true. Through recognizing, acknowledging, and experiencing it, the blocked energy can be released. You are then free to replace it with positive beliefs and attitudes. Shakti Gawain

Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. Alan Alda

Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what he or she thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what this painting isn’t, until he or she finally finds out what it is. And when you finally do find out what one corner of your vision is, you’re off and running. Anne Lamott

A cup is useful only when it is empty; and a mind that is filled with beliefs, with dogmas, with assertions, with quotations is really an uncreative mind. J. Krishnamurti

Creativeness often consists of merely
turning up what is already there.

Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

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No matter how old you get, if you can keep the
desire to be creative, you're keeping the child inside alive.

John Cassavetes

Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. . . most of
the things that are interesting, important, and human are the
results of creativity. . . when we are involved in it, we feel that we
are living more fully than during the rest of life.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The refusal to be creative is an act of self-will and is counter
to our true nature. When we are open to our creativity, we
are opening to God: good, orderly direction. As we pursue our
creative fulfillment, all elements of our life move toward harmony.
As we strengthen our creativity, we strengthen our connection
to the Creator within. Artists love other artists. Our relationship
to God is co-creative, artist to artist. It is God's will for
us to live in creative abundance.

Julia Cameron

I decided to start anew—to strip away what I had been taught, to accept
as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. There was
no one around to look at what I was doing, no one interested, no one to say anything
about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own,
unknown—no one to satisfy but myself. I began with charcoal and paper and
decided not to use any color until it was impossible to do what I wanted
to do in black and white. I believe it was June before I needed blue.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

Henri Matisse

I have a good friend, Rudolf Serkin, the pianist, a very sensitive man.
I was talking to him one day backstage after a concert and I told him
that I thought he had played particularly sensitively that day. I said,
“You know, many pianists are brilliant, they strike the keys so well,
but somehow you are different.” “Ah,” he said, “I don’t think you
should ever strike a key. You should pull the keys with your fingers.”

Andrew Wyeth

creativity 2 - creativity 3 - imagination - art

I learned. . . that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it
kinetic, energetic, striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly
and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a
little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.

Brenda Ueland

Creativity belongs to the artist in each of us. To create means to relate.
The root meaning of the word art is to fit together and we all do this
every day. . . . Each time we fit things together we are creating--whether
it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, a day.

Corita Kent and Jan Steward

The things we fear most in organizations--fluctuations,
disturbances, imbalances--are the primary sources of creativity.

Margaret J. Wheatley

Creation, after all, is only play.	Your expression in all its forms is the dance of creation.
Stephen C. Paul

Creativity comes from the spiritual realm, the collective consciousness.
And the mind is in a different realm than the molecules of the brain.
The brain is a receiver, not a source.

Candace Pert

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what 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

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Erich Fromm

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

Mary Lou Cook

I am much more interested in being creative than in being busy. Creating
feels good. It fills me, restores me, nourishes me and energizes me. There
are many ways to be creative. You can take scrap wood and build your cats
a series of shelves, boxes, and mazes. You can write, paint, shop, or talk
to people. When you are creating, you will feel the sense of creation in your
body, and time will not exist. If you have forgotten what a sense of creation is,
go look at a baby. When we see a baby, we see potential. Remember that
we are all former babies and we all have the potential within us.
Go to the nearest mirror and reflect on it.

Bernie Siegel

If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels
whisper to us when we go for walks.

Raymond Inman

Creativity is God's gift to us. Using our creativity
is our gift back to God.

Julia Cameron

Creativity contributes to our sense of aliveness and our playfulness. . . .
One art teacher, Adriana Diaz, defines creations as "places where
caring and daring come together." They open our eyes to nature and
the body and give us fresh appreciation for both ritual and recreation.

Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

Creativity of all kinds focuses your mind, engages your imagination,
and feeds your soul. Being creative can also facilitate understanding
and encourage healing. Creativity is mindfulness in motion--intuitive,
artistic motion. Creative moments and activities give you a boost
and help you feel energized and good about yourself.

Sue Patton Thoele

There is a prevailing belief that creativity is an inborn trait--you are
either creative or you're not. Well, while creativity is an inborn trait, we
are all born with a creative brain (your right cerebral hemisphere) and
have many creative skills. Children are naturally curious and eager to
explore the world around them and spend hours playing with toys, making
up imaginary friends and pretend games. But as we get older, we begin to
lose some of our natural creativity as we learn and use more left-brain
thinking skills in school and at work. Research shows that our propensity
to generate original ideas reduces from 90% at age 5, to 20% at
age 7 and even further to 2% as adults! However, unless you have
suffered brain damage in your right hemisphere or had it surgically
removed, you still have a creative brain; so you are still creative.
It's just that maybe you don't use your creativity skills
as much as you used to.

Ron White

Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they
can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of
insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine
madness,” to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do
not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with
it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering
music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.

Rollo May
The Courage to Create

Articles and book excerpts on creativity:

Allowing the Soul to Breathe      Tammy Renea Rizer-Averyt
Site to Be Developed      Bernie Siegel
Morning Pages      Asoka Selvarajah
It's Never Too Late to Learn      Michael C. Futa
A Curb to Originality     Earl Nightingale

It is easy to consider the essential role of creativity in bringing joy
and meaning to the human condition--without creativity we have
no art, no literature, no science, no innovation, no problem solving,
no progress. It is, perhaps, less obvious that creativity has an equally
essential role in schools. The processes of creativity parallel those
of learning. Recent calls for authentic activities, teaching for
understanding, and real world problem solving all require engaging
students with content in flexible and innovative ways.

Alane Jordan Starko

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas
as in escaping from old ones.

John Maynard Keynes

A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations.

Gerald Jampolsky

creativity 2 - creativity 3 - imagination - art

I am the one and only me.
I may not think of myself as a creative person, but I know that I have unique talents and skills to share.
For instance, art may appear on a canvas, or it may appear in a meal prepared with love. Some hands sculpt clay or play a musical instrument, and some gently hold the hand of a child. Wisdom can be found in books, but it can also be found in quiet conversation across the kitchen table.
I am creative in my own unique way. As I more fully express who I am, I bless others, and blessings flow back to me. I am creative, productive, and open to divine inspiration. I give my gifts to the world.

unattributed (Daily Word)

Many times we will get more ideas and better ideas in two
hours of creative loafing than in eight hours at a desk.

Wilferd A. Peterson

We are co-creators with God, not puppets on a string waiting for something to happen.

Leo Booth

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the
complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

Charles Mingus

You were being spiritual without even knowing it. Creating art of any kind is an act that involves the part of our souls we usually don't tap into on a daily basis. We rely on our emotions, our intuition and our heart to lead us to the finished product. We use art to express our innermost selves, to bring us closer to our sense of the divine.

The trouble is, most of us haven't done anything creative since we cut out paper snowflakes in third grade. "I was never any good at it," we say. Or, "My stuff will never hang on a museum wall, so what's the point?" It's so easy to neglect the artist in us because most of day-to-day living is so uncreative. We don't need art to raise the kids or attend a meeting or pay the bills, so we assume that it's nonessential for all but the few people lucky enough to be able to make a living at it.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. If anything, we need to express ourselves through art more now as adults than we did as children. For one thing, it's a terrific release for stress-- when you're totally engrossed in capturing a still life or shaping a clay bowl, the rest of the world automatically shuts itself out.

Shana Aborn

You're always believing ahead of your evidence. What was
the evidence I could write a poem? I just believed it. The
most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.

Robert Frost

There is something deeply refreshing about any truly creative
pursuit. And the benefits of creative endeavor don't depend
on the quality of the endeavor. It is the very act of creating
that renews you. This is why I am so passionate about
encouraging people to paint or draw--to create--regardless
of whether or not they have "talent." I believe that any creative
endeavor pays magnificent benefits for the time invested.
Not only does it afford the simple, childlike satisfaction of
playing with materials--smearing paint, scribbling ideas and
images, pounding with hammer and nails--but it also helps
us make connections and understand life a little better.

Thomas Kinkade

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The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole
that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches;
write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity;
make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses
and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on
your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

Steven Johnson
Where Good Ideas Come From

Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make
it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud.

unattributed

When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically
thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most
gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap!

Cynthia Heimel

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

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Behind every advance of the human race is a germ of creation growing
in the mind of some lone individual. An individual whose dreams
waken him or her in the night while others contentedly sleep.

Crawford H. Greenewalt

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter
of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

Maya Lin

This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room,
or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the
newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t
know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you.
This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you
are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first
you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have
a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

Joseph Campbell