Quotes About Creativity

A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If the singer sings from a sense of duty or from seeing no way of escape, I had rather have none.

We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not posses.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative man.

Genius is religious.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.

The man is only a half himself, the other half is his expression

An idea lights a thousand candles.

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet.

Better that the book should be not quite so good, and the writer better, and not himself a ridiculous contrast to all he has written.

So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs,—a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom of time: a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came), which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men. These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul.

We are all wise. The difference between persons is not in wisdom but in art. I knew, in an academical club, a person who always deferred to me; who, seeing my whim for writing, fancied that my experiences had somewhat superior; whilst I saw that his experiences were as good as mine. Give them to me and I would make the same use of them.

Poets are thus liberating gods.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

In a certain state of thought is the common origin of very diverse works. It is the spirit and not the fact that is identical.

But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine

The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.

I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms. If he can draw everything, why draw anything?

The knowledge of picture-dealers has its value, but listen not to their criticism when your heart is touched by genius. It was not painted for them, it was painted for you; for such as had eyes capable of being touched by simplicity and lofty emotions.

As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its owns books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

know exactly what it wants. The one thing it does know is that it feels ill at ease and pinched by society's conventions. Society ought to cherish this voice of resistance and tolerate its excesses. For there is hope in extravagant feeling and creativity, but there is no hope in lifeless repetition and routine.

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...