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He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.
St Francis of Assisi (see works about St Francis of Assisi )
Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.
Dee Hock
Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?
Pablo Picasso (see works by and about Picasso )
You are a gifted and talented person. All successful people focus on what they are good at. Do not try and be a jack of all trades or a good all-rounder. If you go to a music concert you will not see the musicians selling t-shirts or flipping burgers. You will see them playing music and that is all they will do. If you go to the theatre, you will not find the actors selling tickets. They are in the dressing room getting ready for their performance.
Steve Nobel
You're happiest while you're making the greatest contribution.
Robert Kennedy (see works by and about Robert Kennedy )
Use the talents you possess – for the woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except for the best.
Henry Van Dyke
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
Joseph Chilton Pierce
It’s so important to unclutter the mind. For me, creativity is greatly impeded just by the chatter and visual clutter of life. It’s really important to have a space that is really clear for whatever is emerging to come.
Alice Walker
The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.
Jackson Pollock (see works by and about Jackson Pollock )
All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.
MC Richards
We are all saying the same thing in different words.
from There is a Place Where You Are Not Alone, by Hugh Prather (see other works by Hugh Prather )
The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist.
Meister Eckhart (see works by Meister Eckhart )
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, the ant. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.
Pablo Picasso (see works by and about Pablo Picasso )
There is no such thing as talent, only awareness.
Chogyam Trungpa
Writing this book was a little like being pregnant. I could feel something forming and growing inside of me and I knew that I was creating even though nothing seemed to be happening externally. The baby would emerge when it was fully formed and ready.
from Living in the Light, by Shakti Gawain (see other works by Shakti Gawain )
Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.
Mary Lou Cook
The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.
Piet Mondrian (see works by and about Piet Mondrian )
True creative expression, seen as a series of consecutive art movements, is like the trail of a star as it shoots across the sky. It is meaningful creation written in light, evidence of something luminous and largely aware, moving across time. Creativity brings into form inspired, new reality. Perceived from a retrospective vantage point, art history is simply an evolving series of divinely inspired whispers arranged neatly in a row. Intuition of the language of the stars is given to anyone fearlessly willing to let go of the past and to open themselves to the emerging forces of the divine.
from The Inspired Heart, p 135-136, by Jerry Wennstrom
I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping and less like inventing a nuclear bomb.
from The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron (see works by Julia Cameron )
We, as spiritual beings, created the physical world as a place to learn. It’s our school, our playground, our artist’s studio. I beleive that we’re here to master the process of creation – to learn how to consciously channel the creative energy of spirit into physical form.
from Living in the Light, by Shakti Gawain (see other works by Shakti Gawain )
To create, sometimes you must rebel.
Isabelle Duschenay, figure skater, in the film Fire and Ice (see Fire and Ice )
What a Beethoven, Shakespeare or Picasso has done is not create something, so much as they have accessed that place within themselves from which they could express that which has been created by God.
from A Return to Love, by Marianne Williamson (see works by Marianne Williamson )
Discovery consists in seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi 1893-1986 (see works by Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi )
We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.
Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) American author and philosopher (see works by Eric Hoffer )
The tiny act of drawing on the found envelope was the beginning of creation’s return flight into my life, sanctified. I was doing what I wanted to do in a new way. Since art was what I knew best, I brought it with me as a gift when I went somewhere to work with people, or when I stayed in someone’s home. The offering of this aspect of my life was not any sort of barter, a word people often use in trying to explain my life. Instead, it was a spontaneous act with no strings attached, done out of love. When I created art for someone, it was the natural, immediate response to the calling of a larger harmony. Response of this type and nonattachment seem to be prerequisites for the sacredness and magic of any real offering to God or human.
from The Inspired Heart, p135-136, by Jerry Wennstrom
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.
Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) American psychologist (see works by Abraham Maslow )
In the end it all comes down to enthusiasm. Your creativity is basically your expression of God-force. There is nothing more marvelous than doing something you love to do and getting paid for it. It ceases to become work, money, and effort; and it becomes fun, your expression of the joy of life.
from The Trick to Money Is Having Some! by Stuart Wilde (see other works by Stuart Wilde )
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein (see works by and about Albert Einstein )
The creativity that comes from ambition often has the taint of ego in it, no matter how majestic or laudable the production. Its contribution usually serves the general thrust of competition in the world. It titillates the movements of ego and often fosters jealousy and resentment
The creativity that comes from silence, from a quiet heart, feels different from that of ambition to both the creator and the observer. When the artist or the worker is out of the way, both the creator and the observer experience the art as simply a gift, an expression of the impersonal intelligence shared by all. The creator has no need to take credit for it, the observer no need to possess it.
from Passionate Presence, p21-22, by Catherine Ingram (see works by Catherine Ingram )
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
General George S Patton
A painter paints pictures on canvas but musicians paint their pictures on silence.
Leopold Stokowski
The great end of art is to strike the imagination with the power of a soul that refuses to admit defeat even in the midst of a collapsing world.
Friedrich Nietzsche (see works by and about Friedrich Nietzsche )
When you give in to creative passion, it will bring you to the ultimate thresholds of transfiguration and renewal. This growth causes pain but it is a sacred pain. It would be much more tragic to have cautiously avoided these depths and remained marooned on the shiny surfaces of the banal.
from Anam Cara, Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World (p45), by John O’Donohue
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Arthur Koestler
Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work, risking, and by not quite knowing what you’re doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful: yourself.
Alan Alda (see works by, with and about Alan Alda )
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.
George Kneller
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