more quotes, quotations and passages on creativity

creativity - creativity 2 - imagination

Creativity is simply the energy of
making something where there was
nothing before. We do this every day,
in so many unmarked ways.

Fran Sorin
Digging Deep

To be creative, a person has to internalize the entire system that makes creativity possible. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Creativity: Take the obvious, add a cupful of brains, a generous pinch of imagination, a bucketful of courage and daring, stir well and bring to a boil. Bernard Baruch

If we fail to nourish our souls, they wither, and without soul, life ceases to have meaning. The creative process shrivels in the absence of continual dialogue with the soul. And creativity is what makes life worth living. Marion Woodman There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age. Sophia Loren

But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career. Madeleine L'Engle Walking on Water

Why should we all use our creative power? Because there is nothing
that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold, and compassionate,
so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.

Brenda Ueland

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Everything is writeable about if you have the ongoing guts to do it, and
the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Sylvia Plath

Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted,
we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow
it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream,
letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is
made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid,
to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth.
Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Women Who Run With The Wolves

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas
like cats: you make them follow you.

Ray Bradbury
Zen in the Art of Writing

Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in
kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons
away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra,
history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the 'creative bug' is
just a wee voice telling you, 'I'd like my crayons back, please.'

Hugh MacLeod
Ignore Everybody

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire,
you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

George Bernard Shaw

You must not let the things you cannot help destroy you; I am sure
that work is the thing in life. . . . To save your strength and energy for
creating--don't spend it on problems and situations you can't help.

Georgia O'Keeffe

creativity - creativity 2 - imagination

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns
in order to look at things in a different way.

Edward de Bono

When the spirit of child’s play enters into the creative process,
it’s a wonderful force and something to be nurtured.

Joni Mitchell

Anyone can make the simple complicated.
Creativity is making the complicated simple.

Charles Mingus

The best way to become more creative is to create nothing. By this, I mean
that you should return to zero point. Rid yourself of all the mental and
emotional blocks that keep you from manifesting your full creative potential.

Ilchi Lee
Principles of Brain Management

I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every
morning. . . . Every day I find something creative to do with my life.

Miles Davis

There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource
of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we
would be forever repeating the same patterns.

Edward de Bono

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

creativity - creativity 2 - imagination

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn;
it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death
by a frown on the right person’s brow.

Charles Brower

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort
becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form
merely . . . but by watching for a time his or her motions and plays, the
painter enters into the child's nature and can then
draw him or her at every attitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He or she wants
to know about all kinds of things-ancient history, nineteenth century
mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, hog futures. Because
one 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.
But that person has faith that it will happen.

Carl Ally

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

Mary Lou Cook

Whether we are poets or parents or teachers or artists or gardeners, we
must start where we are and use what we have. In the process of creation
and relationship, what seems mundane and trivial may
show itself to be holy, precious, part of a pattern.

Luci Shaw

If you're having difficulty coming up with new ideas, then slow down.
For me, slowing down has been a tremendous source of creativity.
It has allowed me to open up-- to know that there's life under the
earth and that I have to let it come through me in a new way. Creativity
exists in the present moment. You can't find it anywhere else.

Natalie Goldberg

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The key question isn’t “What fosters creativity?” But it is "Why in God’s
name isn’t everyone creative?" Where was the human potential lost?
How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why
do people create?, but why do people not create or innovate? We have
got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity,
as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.

Abraham Maslow

Creativity is. . . seeing something that doesn’t exist already. You need to find
out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God.

Michele Shea

Listen to anyone with an original idea, no matter how absurd it
may sound at first. If you put fences around people,
you get sheep. Give people the room they need.

William McKnight

Because it is possible to create--creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process)--one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail oneself of one's possibilities; one is shirking his or her responsibility to him- or herself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or established patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creative the person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are potentially present.

Rollo May

creativity - creativity 2 - imagination

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 or her great
ideas will prove to be worthless. The creative person is flexible; he or
she is able to change as the situation changes, to break habits, to face
indecision and changes in conditions without undue stress. He or she is
not threatened by the unexpected as rigid, inflexible people are.

Frank Goble

The creative person is willing to live with ambiguity. He or she doesn’t
need problems solved immediately and can afford to wait for the right ideas.

Abe Tannenbaum

Creativity is the quality that you bring to the activity that you are doing.
It is an attitude, an inner approach--how you look at things . . . Whatsoever
you do, if you do it joyfully, if you do it lovingly, if your act of doing
is not purely economical, then it is creative.

Osho

The highest prize we can receive for creative work is the joy of
being creative. Creative effort spent for any other reason than the
joy of being in that light filled space, love, god, whatever
we want to call it, is lacking in integrity.

Marianne Williamson

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it.
The non-existent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

Nikos Kazantzakis

Creativity is not the work of a few. We each carry within us the image of
God the Creator; we each have the task of making the earth into a fairer,
kinder place. The first step is imagining a better world, and that is most
apt to happen when we suffer or look on suffering.

Elizabeth O'Connor
Cry Pain, Cry Hope

Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence,
but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the
despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face
if he or she lives with any creativity at all.

Rollo May

Merton goes on to say that the contradictions in our lives are engines
of creativity. It's true. If we got everything right or everything wrong,
there's be none of the divine discontent or the sense of possibility that
animates our growth. What we get wrong makes us reach for
something better. What we get right reassures us that the
"better" is sometimes within our reach.

Parker J. Palmer
On the Brink of Everything