Quotes About Creation

You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity.

A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything; yours is the last house before the far-off: whoever you are. With your eyes, which in their weariness barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold, you lift very slowly one black tree and place it against the sky: slender, alone. And you have made the world. And it is huge and like a word which grows ripe in silence. And as your will seizes on its meaning, tenderly your eyes let it go...

We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know.

Everything is gestation and then birthing.

Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.

Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.

Every angel is terrible. And yet, alas I welcome you, almost fatal birds of the soul, knowing about you. ... If the archangel came now, the perilous one, from the back of the stars but one step lower and toward us, our own high beating heart would slay us. Who are you? You early successes, spoiled darlings of creation...

A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other. Therefore, my dear Sir, I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths whence your life wells forth; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.

God... sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it... and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better.

And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.

For the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indiferent place.

What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love.

I'm still alive, I have time to build My blood will outlast the rose.

For the creator must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself, and in Nature to which he has attached himself.

Seule, ô abondante fleur, tu crées ton propre espace; tu te mires dans und glace d'odeur. Ton parfum entoure comme d'autres pétales ton innombrable calice. Je te retiens, tu t'étales, prodigieuse actrice.

I want to utter you. I want to portray you not with lapis or gold, but with colors made of apple bark. There is no image I could invent that your presence would not eclipse.

Art means to be oblivious to the fact that the world already exists and to create one.

Das Kunstwerk möchte man also erklären: als ein tiefinneres Geständnis, das unter dem Vorwand einer Erinnerung, einer Erfahrung oder eines Ereignisses sich ausgiebt und, losgelöst von seinem Urheber, allein bestehen kann. Diese Selbständigkeit des Kunstwerkes ist die Schönheit. Mit jedem Kunstwerke kommt ein Neues, ein Ding mehr in die Welt.

Mit deinen Augen, welche müde kaum von der verbrauchten Schwelle sich befrein, hebst du ganz langsam einen schwarzen Baum und stellst ihn vor den Himmel: schlank, allein. Und hast die Welt gemacht. Und sie ist groß und wie ein Wort, das noch im Schweigen reift. Und wie dein Wille ihren Sinn begreift, lassen sie deine Augen zärtlich los ...

Est-ce en exemple que tu te proposes? Peut-on se remplir comme les roses, en multipliant sa subtile matière qu'on avait faite pour ne rien faire? Car ce n'est pas travailler que d'être une rose, dirait-on. Dieu, en regardant par la fenêtre, fait la maison.

If you were to give yourself over to this angel, Rilke tells the reader, some day, some night, the angel's light hands kämen denn … dich ringender zu prüfen, und gingen wie Erzürnte durch das Haus und griffen dich als ob sie dich erschüfen und brächen dich aus deiner Form heraus. would come more fiercely to interrogate you, and rush to seize you blazing like a star, and bend you as if trying to create you, and break you open, out of who you are.

Ein Kunstwerk ist gut, wenn es aus Notwendigkeit entstand.