Creative Act Quotes

There is a ruthlessness to the creative act. It often involves a betrayal of the status quo. ~ Alan Watt

Truly creative people care little about what they have done, and a lot about what they are doing. ~ Alan Cohen

A creative act enhances the beauty of the world; it gives something to the world, it never takes anything from it. A creative person comes into the world, enhances the beauty of the world - a song here, a painting there. He makes the world dance better, enjoy better, love better, meditate better. ~ Rajneesh

During every really creative act, the artist finds himself homeless. To overcome this state he has to call up his last reserves of strength. ~ Asger Jorn

I believe that both art and the human striving for cognitive comprehension are manifest forms of the grand game in which nothing more is stipulated than the game's rules; both art and actively solicited perceptions are but special cases of the recurring creative act to which we owe our existence. ~ Konrad Lorenz

Be a giver. Share whatsoever you can. And remember, I am not making any distinction between. small things and great things. If you can smile whole-heartedly, hold somebody's hand and smile, then it is a creative act, a great creative act. Just embrace somebody to your heart and you are creative. Just look with loving eyes at somebody; just a loving look can change the whole world of a person. ~ Rajneesh

I'm excited about the idea of an act of theatre triggering a parallel creative act of writing. ~ Tim Crouch

My life is a creative act
like a painting, or a concerto. ~ Ram Dass

I would say that the "masterpiece" was the creative act itself and not a particular work which happened to please a large audience and be accepted as the very body of Christ. ~ Henry Miller

Every creative act, however small, enriches our species and the world around us. To find and nurture talent, is to be truly wealthy. ~ Stewart Stafford

Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother did that for me, and with the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her. ~ Trevor Noah

What do we hope to accomplish? What will help us realize our deepest dreams and desires? In what ways is education liberating, and in what ways can schooling be entangling and oppressive? Can learning be cast as a creative act, enjoyable and social, or is it always framed as competitive and brutal? What does it mean to be an educated person? What does it mean to be free? Awakened to fundamental and forbidden questions, a new world of possibilities heaves into view. ~ Bill Ayers

I felt giving birth was the most creative act of all my creative acts - literally creation! ~ Sam Taylor-Wood

Matrices vary from fully automatized skills to those with a high degree of plasticity; but even the latter are controlled by rules of the game which function below the level of awareness. These silent codes can be regarded as condensations of learning into habit. Habits are the indispensable core of stability and ordered behaviour; they also have a tendency to become mechanized and to reduce man to the status of a conditioned automaton. The creative act, by connecting previously unrelated dimensions of experience, enables him to attain to a higher level of mental evolution. It is an act of liberation-the defeat of habit by originality. ~ Arthur Koestler

My robust lexicon notwithstanding, I struggle to find the right words to describe just how much I despise, hate, abhor, revile, detest and categorically abominate anything to do with home maintenance. While cooking strikes me as an essentially creative act, cleaning seems little more than an exercise in decay management, enough to trigger an existential crisis each time the ring around the toilet bowl reappears. ~ Rachel Held Evans

Every creative act is open war against The Way It Is. What you are saying when you make something is that the universe is not sufficient, and what it really needs is more you. And it does, actually; it does. Go look outside. You can't tell me that we are done making the world. ~ Jerry Holkins

Of course, after the creative act no one cared about follow-through. That was beneath them. ~ Carol S. Dweck

The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. And I really believe that. And what I try to teach young people, or anybody in any creative field, is that every idea should seemingly be outrageous. ~ George Lois

By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death. ~ Rollo May

Sleep conceals the creative act while the objective world reveals it. In sleep man impresses the subconscious with his conception of himself. ~ Neville Goddard

Faith is almost the bottom line of creativity; it requires a leap of faith any time we undertake a creative endeavor, whether this is going to the easel, or the page, or onto the stage - or for that matter, in a homelier way, picking out the right fabric for the kitchen curtains, which is also a creative act. ~ Julia Cameron

I like to remind people that creativity also isn't a spark; it's a slog. Every artist, inventor, designer, writer, or other creative in the world will talk about his work being an iterative experience. He'll start with one idea, shape it, move it, combine it, break it, begin anew, discover something within himself, see a new vision, go at it again, test it, share it, fix it, break it, hone it, hone it, hone it, hone it. This might sound like common sense, but it's not common practice, and that's why so many people are terribly uncreative - they're not willing to do the work required to create something that's beautiful, useful, desirable, celebrated. No masterpiece was shaped or written in a day. It's a long slog to get something right. This knowledge and willingness to iterate is what makes the world's most creative people so creative (and successful). ~ Brendon Burchard

I love what Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh and Jesus all said - that love is really the driving principle of the creative act. In fact, they would say that great art is always inspired by love. ~ Erwin McManus

You cannot persist in wanting what you already have. If you assume you are what you desire to be to the point of ecstasy, you no longer want it. Your imaginal act is as much a creative act as a physical one wherein man halts, shrinks and is blessed, for as man creates his own likeness, so does your imaginal act transform itself into the likeness of your assumption. If, however, you do not reach the point of satisfaction, repeat the action over and over again until you feel as though you touched it and virtue went out of you. ~ Neville Goddard

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. ~ George Lois

Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we're so deeply inner connected with one another. Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is the supreme creative act. ~ Ram Dass

I hope people start to look at their lives as the most powerful, creative act they will ever offer this world. ~ Tom Shadyac

If one draws things in a manner which provides only the barest clue to their meaning, the viewer is forced to fill in the gaps by using his own imagination. He is compelled to participate in the creative act, which I consider very important. ~ Antoni Tapies

The creative act is not pure. ~ Nadine Gordimer

In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. ~ Marcel Duchamp

The making of thoughts is the most common instance of human participation in the creative act. ~ Frank Barron

Every creative act involves a new innocence or perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief. ~ Arthur Koestler

Creativity is not a solitary movement. That is its power. Whatever is touched by it, whoever hears it, sees it, senses it, knows it, it's fed. That is why beholding someone else's creative word, images, idea, fills us up, and inspires us to our own creative work. A single creative act has the potential to feed a continent. One creative act can cause a torrent to break through stone. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is a supreme creative act. ~ Ram Dass

My parents taught me to believe that through the creative act, we're able to transcend and give a response to desecration. ~ Atom Egoyan

The creative act always requires a stepping back. It's called the incubation period. The incubation period - one of the four phases of creativity - is when you're not consciously thinking of a problem, and you're letting it marinate. So this is why you hear time and again, people saying they had that "Eureka" moment in the bath, like Archimedes, or in the shower, or while going for a walk or in a coffeehouse. ~ Eric Weiner

The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them. ~ Rollo May

The way I work is not the way that you work, and the whole point of any creative act is that. What I have to offer is me, what you have to offer is you, and if you offer yourself with authenticity and generosity I will be moved. ~ Charlie Kaufman

Theater is the crucible where we can create the dynamics of life without suffering the flames of their combustion. ~ Tom Althouse

Perhaps I can follow a heroic existential nihilist's sterling example of surviving the harshness of reality by employing an attentive narrative examination of my recalcitrant life to extract shards of personal truth and elicit a synthesizing purposefulness of my being from the darkness, anarchy, and chaos of existence. Perhaps through the act of engaging in a deliberative examination of the ontological mystery of being and investigating the accompanying stark brutal doubt that renders a materialistic life intolerably senseless, absurd, and meaningless, I can confront the baffle of being and establish a guiding set of personal values to live by in an indifferent world. Perhaps by using the contemplative tools of narrative storytelling, I can strictly scrutinize the key leaning rubrics veiled within an array of confusing personal life experiences. Perhaps by engaging in a creative act of discovery I can blunt the pain and anguish that comes from the nightmarish experience of suffering from an existential crisis. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The concept of encounter also enables us to make clearer the important distinction between talent and creativity. Talent may well have its neurological correlates and can be studied as "given" to a person. A man or woman may have talent whether he or she uses it or not; talent can probably be measured in the person as such. But creativity can be seen only in the act. If we were purists, we would not speak of a "creative person," but only of a creative act. ~ Rollo May

Is it possible that the creative act is simply the materialization of the future- making the invisible, visible? ~ Erwin McManus

Major scientific insights are characteristically intuitive, and equally characteristically described in scientific papers by linear analytical arguments. There is no anomaly in this: it is, rather, just as it should be. The creative act has major right-hemisphere components. But arguments on the
validity of the result are largely left-hemisphere functions. ~ Carl Sagan

Creativity is a magic wand that works two ways. When you set it in action and seek to create something, it does not just brings into existence that object or work, it also raises in your heart a dream, a hope, and a will to achieve that creation. And when all else seems lost and steeped in hopelessness, the magic of creativity can still keep you going. For when all else seem dark, an urge to create something would still give you an aim to look forward to. And if you just take hold of this urge, it will take hold of you and see you through even the darkest times. Like it did to me. ~ Jyoti Arora

In its essence, a meal is a creative act that has its genesis in the mind of someone who cares enough to plan it, gather ingredients and labor over its creation. ~ Andi Ashworth

But revision is a creative act, not merely an analytical imposition of rules of style on a more creative first draft. That's a myth - that the first draft is more creative and everything after that is ruining creativity. ~ K.M. Soehnlein

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate. ~ Joy Harjo

If you invent something, you're doing a creative act. It's like writing a novel or composing music. You put your heart and soul into it, and money. It's years of your life, it's your house remortgaged, huge emotional investment and financial investment. ~ James Dyson

Reading is not a passive act. It's a creative act. It's a relationship between the writer and a person the writer will probably never meet. I think it's very wrong to write in a way that leaves no room for the reader to maneuver. I don't want to get in the way. What I'd really like to do is to perform the Indian Rope Trick - go higher and higher and eventually disappear. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Enthusiasm is when the universe creates through you. You are involved in a creative act. You are bringing something new into this world. When that energy comes in, you feel an intense aliveness that flows into what you do. That is enthusiasm. ~ Eckhart Tolle

By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death. ~ Rollo May

Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world ... I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands. ~ Pablo Picasso

After each creative act one has to be sustained by one's strength of character, by a moral sense, by I don't know what, lest one tumble. ~ Etty Hillesum

The creative act is also in a small way a suffering act - we start out with our ego, this hope of making this thing whatever it be, but so often it eludes us and it collapses and we kind of regress into this mental suffering, we can't find what we're looking for. ~ Michael Leunig

Failure is built into creativity ... the creative act involves this element of 'newness' and 'experimentalism,' then one must expect and accept the possibility of failure. ~ Saul Bass

Neither black/red/yellow nor woman but poet or writer. For many of us, the question of priorities remains a crucial issue. Being merely "a writer" without a doubt ensures one a status of far greater weight than being "a woman of color who writes" ever does. Imputing race or sex to the creative act has long been a means by which the literary establishment cheapens and discredits the achievements of non-mainstream women writers. She who "happens to be" a (non-white) Third World member, a woman, and a writer is bound to go through the ordeal of exposing her work to the abuse and praises and criticisms that either ignore, dispense with, or overemphasize her racial and sexual attributes. Yet the time has passed when she can confidently identify herself with a profession or artistic vocation without questioning and relating it to her color-woman condition. ~ Trinh T. Minh-ha

The degree of talent, the size of the gift, is immaterial. All artists must listen, but not all hear great symphonies, see wide canvasses, conceive complex, character-filled novels. No
matter, the creative act is the same, and it is an act of faith. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

What if the creative act is not an act against God but a reflection of His image within us? ~ Erwin Raphael McManus

Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act. ~ Carl Jung

Behind every creative act is a statement of love. Every artistic creation is a statement of gratitude. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder. ~ Edward Hirsch

Understanding is a creative act in a dimension we do not see. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

The real importance of automatism lay in the fact that it led to a different relation between the artist and the creative act. Where the artist had traditionally been seen as someone who invents a personal world, bringing into being something unique to his own 'genius', the surrealists conceived themselves as explorers and researchers rather than 'artist' in the traditional sense and it was discovery rather than invention that became crucial for them. ~ Michael Richardson

What is your idea of you? Who is it that you have decided to become? If your greatest work of art is the life you live, and ultimately life is a creative act, what life will you choose to leave behind as your masterpiece? ~ Erwin Raphael McManus

The creative act of the artist lifts him above himself by demanding full surrender. No one puts words on paper or paint on canvas, doubting. If one doubts, one does so five minutes later ... ~ Czeslaw Milosz

Entrepreneurship is the ability to create and build from a vision practically anything; fundamentally it is a human, creative act. ~ Jeffry A Timmons

To tell the truth is a super avantguarde creative act ~ El Roto

To voice something you're feeling and put observations into words with another person who is totally present is a creative act embodying soul and love. ~ Jean Shinoda Bolen

Man is happiest when he is creating. In fact, the highest state of which man is capable lies in the creative act. ~ Leo Buscaglia

Once you accept the power of spine in the creative act, you will become much more efficient in your creativity. You will still get lost on occasion, but having a spine will anchor you. ~ Twyla Tharp

The recalling of beautiful things, whether they are your own experiences or the acheivements of others, is a creative act. Simple ideas can be restated by rote; but profound ideas must be recreated by will and imagination. ~ Robert Grudin

There is a creative act involved by the receiver as well as by the sender and that makes for innovation. Both sides are equally important. ~ Kirk Varnedoe

Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act. ~ Rollo May

I saw, more than anything, that relationships are not sustained by violence but by love. Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. ~ Trevor Noah

Reading a good comic is a creative act. Watching a film is often a more passive experience, and since I'm interested in engaging that conversational aspect of creativity, I'm trying to find ways of achieving that in my films. ~ Dave McKean

So every creative act strives to attain an absolute status; it longs to create a world of beauty to triumph over chaos and convert it to order. ~ Rowan Williams

The creative act is not hanging on, but yielding to a new creative movement. Awe is what moves us forward. ~ Joseph Campbell

The war, as I felt it and a lot of my compatriots felt it, was a creative act. ~ Lawrence Halprin

Getting sober is a radically creative act. ~ Meredith Bell

It was a truth that he had painfully been forced to acknowledge for some time, at least to himself: that the creative force in life was extravagance rather than tightfistedness, gambling rather than calculation, and that every true creative act was born of risk taking, without which nothing better than sterile repetition was ever possible. ~ Davide Longo

Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the "divine madness," to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean. ~ Rollo May

unified self. Misleadingly identifying the Demiurge with the Anthropos, Jung says: The primordial image of the quaternity coalesces, for the Gnostics, with the figure of the demiurge or Anthropos. He is, as it were, the victim of his own creative act, for, when he descended into Physis, he was caught in her embrace. The image of the anima mundi or Original Man latent in the dark of matter expresses the presence of a transconscious centre which, because of its quaternary character and its roundness, must be regarded as a symbol of wholeness.76 ~ C. G. Jung

Creativeness is liberation from slavery. Man is free when he finds himself in a state of creative activity. Creativeness leads to ecstasy of the moment. The products of creativeness are within time, but the creative act itself lies outside time. ~ Nikolai Berdyaev

The creative act does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, and skills. ~ Arthur Koestler

Building a business is a creative act. Few of us realize when we start out that we are creating not only a company but a culture. That's because it's usually not planned. It just happens. While everyone is focused on something else, making sales, providing service, sending out invoices, a little community springs up. It has its own unspoken customs, traditions, modes of dress and speech, and rules of behavior. By the time you become aware of it, the culture is often well established and it will probably be a reflection of your personality. ~ Jack Daly

As any mom knows, having a baby is an extremely creative act and to love and create a baby, it's on par with any other creative act that we could come up with. ~ Ani DiFranco

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. ~ Marcel Duchamp

The most dangerous of our impulses reign in ourselves against ourselves. To dissolve them is a creative act. ~ Hugo Von Hofmannsthal

The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think that's a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas. ~ Rupert Sheldrake

Beauty is a function of truth, truth a function of beauty. They can be separated by analysis, but in the lived experience of the creative act-and of its re-creative echo in the beholder-they are inseparable as thought is inseparable from emotion. They signal, one in the language of the brain, the other of the bowels, the moment of the Eureka cry, when 'the infinite is made to blend itself with the finite'-when eternity is looking through the window of time. Whether it is a medieval stained-glass window or Newton's equation of universal gravity is a matter of upbringing and chance; both are transparent to the unprejudiced eye. ~ Arthur Koestler

I have coined the term 'bisociation' in order to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single 'plane', as it were, and the creative act, which, as I shall try to show, always operates on more than one plane. The former may be called single-minded, the latter a double-minded, transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed. ~ Arthur Koestler

Any human act that gives rise to something new is referred to as a creative act, regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him. ~ Lev S. Vygotsky

The most creative act you will ever undertake is the act of creating yourself. ~ Deepak Chopra

Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God? ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Your audience is your adversary. If you don't have one get one - imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination. You can't tell your story effectively and leave it out. It must be alive in you, vividly alive. It is in conflict with everything that is false in what you have written. If it is an audience worthy of your talent and potential, it won't let you slide by the lies, the laziness, the shortcuts. If you don't take audience seriously, you can be sure it will return the favor. ~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

Who told you that you were naked? Who have you been listening to?..'

This is a tragic reminder that we humans have the strange capacity to live a soulless life. Our inner voice was never supposed to be simply an echo. Our inner voice was always to resonate with the voice of God. Every other voice will either make us less than we were intended to be or convince us that we are more than we really are. Neither self-loathing nor self-worship helps us find our authentic voice. It is only when our inner voice responds to the voice of God that we begin to truly find to find our own voice. As critical as it is for us to understand that art is always an extension of ourselves, the creative act is also an expression of our essence.

It is equally important for us to realize that our guiding narrative determines the story we tell through our lives. Our inner voice not only informs us of who we are, but affects everything we touch. And in the end, becomes the driving force through which we strive to shape the world around us. The principal creative act described in Genesis chapter 1 begins with God speaking the universe into existence. God speaks out of who He is and everything in creation is a declaration of His glory. ~ Erwin Raphael McManus

I live, at all times, for imaginative fiction; for ambivalence, not instruction. When language serves dogma, then literature is lost. I live also, and only, for excellence. My care is not for the cult of egalitarian mediocrity that is sweeping the world today, wherein even the critics are no longer qualified to differentiate, but for literature, which you may notice I have not defined. I would say that, because of its essential ambivalence, 'literature' is: words that provoke a response; that invite the reader or listener to partake of the creative act. There can be no one meaning for a text. Even that of the writer is a but an option.

"Literature exists at every level of experience. It is inclusive, not exclusive. It embraces; it does not reduce, however simply it is expressed. The purpose of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple: to integrate without reduction; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery. We have to find parables; we have to tell stories to unriddle the world.

"It is a paradox: yet one so important I must restate it. The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth; but what we feel most deeply cannot be spoken in words. At this level only images connect. And so story becomes symbol; and symbol is myth."

"It is one of the main errors of historical and rational analysis to suppose that the 'original form' of myth can be separated from its ~ Alan Garner

The event, in its emergence, poses its own premises, determining that they were the conditions for its realization. This transition is always the result of a salto mortale, which is a creative act in the sense that it gives the preceding links in the chain of events their meaning. ~ Stathis Kouvelakis

Empathy is a creative act. It is the act of imagining ourselves not only in another's shoes, but perhaps inhabiting their very heart and soul. ~ Michele Jennae

There is an art to grieving. To grieve well the loss of anyone or anything
a parent, a love, a child, an era, a home, a job
is a creative act. It takes attention and patience and courage. But many of us do not know how to grieve. We were never taught, and we don't see examples of full-bodied grieving around us. Our culture favors the fast-food model of mourning
get over it quick and get back to work; affix the bandage of "closure" and move on. ~ Elizabeth Lesser