Quotes About Creativity

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages.

Insist upon yourself. Be original.

Break the monotony. Do something strange and extravagant!

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

Imitation cannot go above its model.

The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses.

There are no days in life that are so memorable as those that vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot.

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

The poets made all the words and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.

When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

All writing comes by the grace of God.

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good.

The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the man, could we lay him open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the sea-shell preexist in the secreting organs of the fish.

Genius is the activity which repairs the decay of things.

Congratulate yourself if you have broken the monotony of a conventional age

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm...Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.