Quotes About Creativity

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.

All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!

A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

Not our logical faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us. I might say, priest and prophet to lead us to heaven-ward, or magician and wizard to lead us hellward.

know a Work of Art from a Daub of Artifice)

The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too.

Whatever opinion may be formed of the extent of his dissipation in Dumfries, one fact is unquestionable, that his powers remained unimpaired to the last; it was there he produced his finest lyrics, and they are the finest, as well as the purest, that ever delighted mankind.

Ever in the dullest existence there is a sheen either of Inspiration or of Madness

Carlyle thought little of these Essays. "Wretched lives" is his best word for them when he is bilious and the world is all gloom; but when in another place he confesses that he was seldom happier than when writing them, we may take his condemnation as he did his bile, "with a drop of oil and a grain of salt.

Of the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful and worthy are the things we call Books! –

What would it be like if you lived each day, each breath, as a work of art in progress Imagine that you are a Masterpiece unfolding, every second of every day, a work of art taking form with every breath.

thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples.

Let there be a patron like Maecenus, Flaccus, and your lands will give you a poet like Virgil

I am more aware of the world now, the tiny insignificant things especially. I am beginning to be more childlike. For an artist this may have some advantages.

Cut my legs off but don't take away my ability to think, dream, and write

The man who never dreams, goes slowly mad.

When I was younger, acting, singing and dancing was what it was all about. That's really what kept me in school because I was really naughty otherwise.

I was a very naughty kid, who'd say 'I'd write tomorrow.'