Quotes About Creativity

There is nothing that art cannot express

We should remember that all the arts are fine arts and all the arts decorative arts.

Es una triste verdad, pero hemos perdido la capacidad de dar nombres bonitos a las cosas. Los nombres lo son todo.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the ocassion. It is not he who is revelead by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas , reveals himself.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

the poet must sing, and the sculptor think in bronze, and the painter make the world a mirror for his moods, as surely and as certainly as the hawthorn must blossom in spring, and the corn turn to gold at the harvest-time, and the moon in her ordered wanderings change from shield to sickle, and from sickle to shield.

Destroy your manuscript, but save whatever you have inscribed in the margin out of boredom, out of helplessness, and, as it were, in a dream. (The Egyptian Stamp)

Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move.

We meet from time to talk and argue…about what we as artists can do, how we can express the anguish for the moral situation we find in this country, but not as civil rights pleaders.

One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.

et ignotas animum dimittit in artes, naturamque nouat. (to arts unknown he bends his wits, and alters nature.)

or that writing a poem you can read to no one is like dancing in the dark.

Poetry comes fine spun from a mind at peace.

Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes. And he sets his mind to unknown arts.

For such a career I lacked both endurance and inclination: the stress of ambition left me cold, while the Muse, the creative spirit, was forever urging on me that haven of leisure to which I'd always leaned. The poets of those days I cultivated and cherished: for me, bards were so many gods.

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn.

the gods are created by poets --Ovid

And he sets his mind to unknown arts

I prate of ancient poets' monstrous lies, Ne'er seen or now or then by human eyes.

Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua. — Venus & Adonis, May 1593

et ignotas animum dimittit in artes, naturamque nouat.

Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes / And he applies his mind to unknown arts