Creative Life Quotes

It is the psychic depression of decadence which has come to this place and time. It is what happens to people who ignore their artists and deny their children. It is a terminal case of involutional melancholia which comes from within and cannot be cured by T.V. or psychotherapy or anything but a creative life, which is hard to come by in a country where it doesn't pay to do anything for yourself. ~ Jennifer Stone

All forms of birth
physical, intellectual, spiritual or emotional
bring one to the depths. The power to give birth originates in the creative life spirit birthing all, the seen and the unseen. ~ Amy Wright

The creative life of the commercial photographer is like the life of a butterfly. Very seldom do we see a photographer who is really productive for more than eight or ten years. ~ Alexey Brodovitch

To live a creative life we must forget our fear of being wrong. ~ Joseph Chilton Pearce

Is our day of creative life finished? Does there remain to us only the strange, awful afterwards of the knowledge in dissolution,the African knowledge, but different for us, who are blond and blue-eyed from the north? ... There was another way, the way of freedom. There was the paradisal entry into pure, single beingwhich accepted the obligation of the permanent connection with others, and with the other, submits to the yoke and leash of love, but never forfeits its own proud individual singleness, even while it loves and yields. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. We become original because we become something specific, an origin from which work flows. ~ Julia Cameron

I've realized I don't need to keep looking for my path. I'm already on it. I just need to trust where it leads. ~ Teresa R. Funke, Bursts Of Brilliance For A Creative Life Blog

Why should a man marry and have children, study and build a career; why should he invent new techniques, build new institutions, and develop new ideas--when he doubts if there will be a tomorrow which can guarantee the value of human effort?
Crucial here for nuclear man is the lack of a sense of continuity, which is so vital for a creative life. He finds himself part of a nonhistory in which only the sharp moment of the here and now is valuable. For nuclear man life easily becomes a bow whose string is broken and from which no arrow can fly. In his dislocated state he becomes paralyzed. His reactions are not anxiety and joy, which were so much a part of existential man, but apathy and boredom. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

Fame is part of me and my life as an actor. I enjoy the creative aspects of my life as an actor. I enjoy directing and acting as well. But the bottom line for me is not prestige and power. It's about having an exciting, creative life. ~ Matt Dillon

Life is creative. It makes it up as it goes along. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

You have to be able to make a real creative life for Yourself, before you can expect anyone Else to provide one ready-made for you. ~ Sylvia Plath

El duende is literally the goblin wind or force behind a person's actions and creative life, including the way they walk, the sound of their voice, even the way they lift their little finger. It is a term used in flamenco dance, and is also used to describe the ability to "think" in poetic images. Among Latina curanderas who recollect story, it is understood as the ability to be filled with spirit that is more than one's own spirit. Whether one is the artist or whether one is the watcher, listener, or reader, when el duende is present, one sees it, hears it, reads it, feels it underneath the dance, the music, the words, the art; one knows it is there. When el duende is not present, one knows that too. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

As artists, it is our job to question the rules and ask if they are relevant or outdated, necessary or arbitrary, helpful or oppressive. ~ Teresa R. Funke, Bursts Of Brilliance For A Creative Life Blog

Creation is boundless
Life is eternal
All living things dance with joy
when they realise that in every atom
of time and space
is the spark of eternal life

Everyone is an aspect of Light
and are potentially the blazing glory
of the whole of Light
Be aware of your inner eternality
Be aware that you are not a speck of dust
on the face of the Universe

You are a cell in a mighty blood stream
of Cosmic power
Know that you are a living vital part
of the essence of creative life ~ Natasha Rendell

Often my creative life has seemed like a long tunnel, dark and damp. And sometimes I wondered whether I could live through it. But I did! ~ Ai Qing

If you want to do something creative, life won't wait. ~ Hilary Reyl

There are moments in a creative life when you understand why you do it. Those moments might last a few seconds or maybe, for some people, years. But whatever the actual time that passes, they still feel like a single moment. Fragile in the way a moment is, liable to be shattered by a breath, set apart from all the other passing time, distinct.
But then it changes. And what seemed unimaginably exhilarating gets bogged down, even when a project is going well. It is a gradual, inevitable sobering during which your right to be passive diminishes. What the ether has given you, now in fact belongs to you. And then it is work. Then it is hard. ~ Robin Black

A woman's life may die away in the fore of self-hatred for complexes can bite hard and, at least for a time, successfully frighten her away from coming too near the work or life that matters to her ... Many years are spent not going, not moving, not learning, not finding out, not obtaining, not taking on, not becoming. The vision a woman has for her own life can also be decimated at someone else's jealousy or someone's plain out destructiveness towards her family, mentors, teachers, and friends are not supposed to be destructive if and when they feel envy, but some decidedly are, in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. No woman can afford to let her creative life hang by a thread while she serves an antagonistic love relationship , parent, teacher or friend. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Teachers have to respect the privacy of students' creative life, but at the same time give them a chance to express themselves. ~ Jan Brett

Medicines have limitations; the divine creative life force has none. - Swami Sri Yukteswar ~ Kimberly Snyder

The call to the creative life is a call to dignity, to a life of vulnerability and adventure and the call to a life that exquisite excitement and indeed ecstasy will often visit. ~ John O'Donohue

Be assertive, be attentive and be creative. The world needs people who can add value. ~ Gift Gugu Mona

Be spontaneous!
Never be afraid to try new things
or find new ways!
Don't let routine ruin your life! ~ Mouloud Benzadi

If you build a wall to separate people, there will be those who find a way around the wall, or over it, or under it, or through it. We humans are not meant to be contained, and neither are our thoughts. ~ Teresa R. Funke, Bursts Of Brilliance For A Creative Life Blog

The paradox that you need to comfortably inhabit, if you wish to live a contented creative life, goes something like this: "My creative expression must be the most important thing in the world to me (if I am to live artistically), and it also must not matter at all (if I am to live sanely)." Sometimes ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I will always be safe from the random hurricanes of outcome as long as I never forget where I rightfully live. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

It's like in eco-economics where what you take from the system has to be balanced by what you give in to it, balanced or exceeded to create that anti-entropic surge which characterizes all creative life and especially this step across to a new world, this place that is neither nature nor culture, transformation of a planet into a world and then a home. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you're 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written, or you didn't go swimming in those warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It's going to break your heart. Don't let this happen. ~ Anne Lamott

One cannot live a creative life without first letting go of the fear of being wrong. ~ Sir David Baird, 1st Baronet

People wonder when you're allowed to call yourself a writer. I think maybe the answer is when you recognize that is work." - Nina MacLaughlin, 'With Compliments ~ Manjula Martin

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism. ~ Will Self

To truly live a creative life means that you will need to experiment in as many different fields as possible. ~ Moby

Adidas is a very personal inspiration to me. It has enriched my creative life. It's an exchange between different cultures, different ideas, and most of all, it is teamwork. ~ Yohji Yamamoto

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. ~ Joseph Chilton Pearce

You can clear out whatever obstacles are preventing you from living your most creative life, with the simple understanding that whatever is bad for you is probably also bad for your work. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

To choose to be alone is to bait the trap, to create a space the demons cannot resist entering. And that's the good news; the demons that enter can be named, written about, and tamed through the miracle of the healing word, the miracle of art, the miracle of silence. ~ Fenton Johnson

Your personal life, your professional life, and your creative life are all intertwined. I went through a few very difficult years where I felt like a failure. But it was actually really important for me to go through that. Struggle, for me, is the most inspirational thing in the world at the end of the day - as long as you treat it that way. ~ Skylar Grey

I have a sequence to my creative life. In spring and fall, I am above ground and commit to community. In the summer, I'm outside. It is a time for family. And in the winter, I am underground. Home. This is when I do my work as a writer - in hibernation. I write with the bears. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

The creative life [is] the only one for a serious man. ~ G.H. Hardy

You have lost all delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. You are half-deliberately, half-desperately cutting off your grip on creative life. You are becoming a neuter machine. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell-if you could do a lot of things over again, ah, how differently you would do them! You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors. ~ Sylvia Plath

The secret of the creative life is how to feel at ease with your own embarrassment. We're all in the dirty laundry business and we're being paid to take risks and look silly. Race car drivers get paid to risk their lives in a more concrete way; we get paid to risk our lives in an emotional way. ~ Paul Schrader

The best part about dreams is that, like all great stories, we get to decide the endings. ~ Teresa R. Funke, Bursts Of Brilliance For A Creative Life Blog

One of the major challenges facing creative individuals is that of building upon the continuity of human knowledge while achieving novel insights ... On the one hand, to intensify an inquiry and develop a sense of commitment to a creative life, the learner needs models, teachers, and collaborators. On the other hand, the individual, while building upon the past, needs to transform it, and thus broaden his or her choices. ~ Vera John-Steiner

Our art is never really ours. Each person who experiences it brings to it a piece of themselves and reacts to it in ways that stem from their personal struggles, beliefs, morals, and even hang-ups. ~ Teresa R. Funke, Bursts Of Brilliance For A Creative Life Blog

Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one's mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Your greatest creation is your creative life. It's all in your hands. Rejection can't take it away; reviews can't take it away. The life you create for yourself as an artist, may be the only thing that's really yours. Create a life you can center yourself in calmly as you wait for your work to grow. ~ Sara Zarr

At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn't possible to save mankind. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

I think that the very earliest influence was a horror of having to work in a bank or an office, a desire for a free and creative life. ~ Frank Auerbach

In order to live a creative life, we must give up the fear of being
wrong. ~ Satyen Raja

Being a screenwriter is not enough for a full creative life. ~ William Goldman

Originals by Adam Grant is one of the best books I've read on how to be more creative at work and how to think outside the box, sell your ideas, and make a difference. 10.YOUR CREATIVE LIFE. The War of Art by Steven ~ Vishen Lakhiani

It's ever so fun and fulfilling to be clever, but more lasting and effective to be consistent. ~ Teresa R. Funke, Bursts Of Brilliance For A Creative Life Blog

Reading, Writing, and Enjoying A Creative Life. ~ Chrystal Dorsey

I've spent my creative life so far first in the theatre, then on the page, then on the screen, examining what is turning out as I grow older to look like one enormous landscape.

What I originally thought were different worlds turn out to be one interconnected place. And like a bedspread viewed by a sick child from his pillow, I am very aware that there are colours in various corners which I know very well, but I haven't yet found the ways to get from the blue to the green and from the green to the red.

I've just begun, and I suppose that's become my preoccupation – the idea that at one point I will see it clearly. ~ Clive Barker

I play piano and that's my love. I read and I paint and I compose music, so I've got a pretty full creative life. And it's not because, I'm obsessively creative. ~ Anthony Hopkins

Life wants so very much to live. ~ Timothy Simpson

There has to be something other than keeping busy that gives human life value, because our society so often functions as if 'productivity' and/or 'usefulness' are the measures of human value, and - particularly for artists - this is deeply problematic. We shouldn't given in. ~ Tasha Golden

You will pass through storms and heavy rains, and at times you will suffer defeat. The essence of the creative life, however, is not to give up in the face of defeat but to follow the rainbow that exists within your heart. ~ Daisaku Ikeda

All my life I've had the privilege to make my living with my imagination, and the most important thing has been to see my creative life grow. I was educated to do that and have lived accordingly. ~ Tommy Lee Jones

Artfulness is not simple entertainment,
especially during upheaval,
unleashing creative life is sacred duty. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

When anyone starts out to do something creative - especially if it seems a little unusual - they seek approval, often from those least inclined to give it. But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism - you learn this as you go on. ~ Will Self

I am tapping into a place in you that is unexplored, and very dangerous, but I think essential to the creative life of an artist. ~ Brandon Boyd

There is not ultimate breakthrough; what we find in the development of a creative life is an open-ended series of provisional breakthroughs. In this journey there is no endpoint, because it is the journey into the soul. ~ Stephen Nachmanovitch

Beauty shouldn't be taken too seriously. Life is stressful enough! Hair should be creative and crazy. ~ Guido Palau

Make a commitment to do something, anything, every day to make your creative life a real part of your daily routine. ~ Barbara Delaney

If your art is calling to you, its doing so for a reason. You are feeling a pull toward something for which your soul is yearning. ~ Teresa R. Funke, Bursts Of Brilliance For A Creative Life Blog

I love that I live a creative life. It is in the work that I do - acting, writing, and directing. It's also in the mindfulness of every part of my life, from a meal that I prepare for family and friends to putting my imagination to work in a garden. ~ Regina Taylor

Something else gets under your skin, keeps you working days and nights at the sacrifice of your sleeping and eating and attention to your family and friends, something beyond the love of puzzle solving. And that other force is the anticipation of understanding something about the world that no one has ever understood before you.

Einstein wrote that when he first realized that gravity was equivalent to acceleration -- an idea that would underlie his new theory of gravity -- it was the "happiest thought of my life." On projects of far smaller weight, I have experienced that pleasure of discovering something new. It is an exquisite sensation, a feeling of power, a rush of the blood, a sense of living forever. To be the first vessel to hold this new thing.

All of the scientists I've known have at least one more quality in common: they do what they do because they love it, and because they cannot imagine doing anything else. In a sense, this is the real reason a scientist does science. Because the scientist must. Such a compulsion is both blessing and burden. A blessing because the creative life, in any endeavor, is a gift filled with beauty and not given to everyone, a burden because the call is unrelenting and can drown out the rest of life.

This mixed blessing and burden must be why the astrophysicist Chandrasekhar continued working until his mid-80's, why a visitor to Einstein's apartment in Bern found the young physicist rocking his infant wit ~ Alan Lightman

A creative moment is part of a longer creative process which, in turn, is part of a creative life. ~ Tom Wujec

"A creative life is not just for those fictional few who are "touched by the hand of God." We are all touched by the hand of God." ~ Joseph Curiale

Putting our art out there is one of the biggest risks we can take. It's a special kind of vulnerability. It takes guts to be an artist. ~ Teresa R. Funke, Bursts Of Brilliance For A Creative Life Blog

If a man devotes himself to the instructions of his own unconscious, it can bestow this gift [of renewal], so that suddenly life, which has been stale and dull, turns into a rich unending inner adventure, full of creative possibilities ~ Marie-Louise Von Franz

The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

I sometimes wonder whether the act of surrender is not one of the greatest of all - the highest. It is one of the [most] difficult of all ... You see it's so immensely complicated. It needs real humility and at the same time, an absolute belief in one's own essential freedom. It is an act of faith. At the last moments, like all great acts, it is pure risk. This is true for me as a human being and as a writer. Dear Heaven, how hard it is to let go - to step into the blue. And yet one's creative life depends on it and one desires to do nothing else. ~ Katherine Mansfield

Your body's ability to function as a clean and efficient channel is limited by stiffness, lack of strength, and lack of endurance. Your mind's ability is limited by the way it thinks about itself, by the way you think about you. The process of yoga is one of undoing the obstructions and limitations in your body and mind that inhibit the free flow of creative life force. ~ Erich Schiffmann

Sadly, some people never get beyond the box stage in their creative life. We all know people who have announced that they've started work on a project
say, a book
but some time passes, and when you politely ask how it's going, they tell you that they're still researching. Weeks, months, years pass and they produce nothing. They have tons of research but it's never enough to nudge them toward the actual process of writing the book. ~ Twyla Tharp

As with everything else, the more we separate ourselves from each other, the weaker we become. ~ Teresa R. Funke, Bursts Of Brilliance For A Creative Life Blog

If you want to live a creative life, get efficient at failing. ~ Matthew Donnelly

In my creative life, David Bowie is definitely an enormous influence on me, being one of rock's greatest shapeshifters. ~ Scott Weiland

The libertarian can have no truck with 'left' or 'right' because he regrets any form of authoritarianism - the use of police force to control the creative life of man. ~ Leonard Read

I've learned that the creative life may or may not be the apex of human civilization, but either way it's not what I thought it was. It doesn't make you special and sparkly. You don't have to walk alone. You can work in an office - I've worked in offices for the past 15 years and written five novels while doing it. The creative life is forgiving: You can betray it all you want, again and again, and no matter how many times you do, it will always take you back. ~ Lev Grossman

To live a creative life we must first lose the fear of being wrong. ~ Joseph Chilton Pearce

Missions then is less about the transportation of God from one place to another and more about the identification of a God who is already there [ ... ] You see God where others don't. And then you point him out. So the issue isn't so much taking Jesus to people who don't have him, but going to a place and pointing out to the people the creative, life-giving God who is already present in their midst. ~ Rob Bell

The possibility of being as free with the camera as we are with the pen is a fantastic prospect for the creative life of the 21st century. ~ Carlos Fuentes

I'm trying to dismantle a stereotype that in order to live any kind of creative life, you have to be in torment and suffering. We're addicted to this idea because it makes for good bio pics ... but I actually think it's better to live a life where you're constantly exploring your curiosity and creativity. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life. ~ Aldous Huxley

A creative life is an amplified life. It's a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life. Living in this manner - continually and stubbornly bringing forth the jewels that are hidden within you - is a fine art, in and of itself. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

My idea in terms of managing a narrative, or in thinking in my creative life, is that you could easily argue that the past, the present and the future all occur simultaneously, and if you can postulate that, then you're not strictly bound to a linear narrative. ~ Tommy Lee Jones

The creative life! Ascension. Passing beyond oneself. Rocketing out into the blue, grasping at flying ladders, mounting, soaring, lifting the world up by the scalp, rousing the angels from their ethereal lairs, drowning in stellar depths, clinging to the tails of comets. Nietzsche had written of it ecstatically - and then swooned forward into the mirror to die in root and flower. «Stairs and contradictory stairs,» he wrote, and then suddenly there was no longer any bottom; the mind, like a splintered diamond, was pulverized by the hammer−blows of truth. There was a time when I acted as my father's keeper. I was left alone for long hours, cooped up in the little booth which we used as an office. While he was drinking with his cronies I was feeding from the bottle of creative life. My companions were the free spirits, the overlords of the soul. The young man sitting there in the mingy yellow light became completely unhinged; he lived in the crevices of great thoughts, crouched like a hermit in the barren folds of a lofty mountain range. From truth he passed to imagination and from imagination to invention. At this last portal, through which there is no return, fear beset him. To venture farther was to wander alone, to rely wholly upon oneself. The purpose of discipline is to promote freedom. But freedom leads to infinity and infinity is terrifying. Then arose the comforting thought of stopping at the brink, of setting down in words the mysteries of impulsion, compulsion, propu ~ Henry Miller

The secret of the creative life is to feel at ease with your own embarrassment. ~ Paul Schrader

That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." You can't eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they've saved your life ... But we don't say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It's interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don't we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt? ~ Ariel Gore

Never let your goals or convictions get in the way of living your life. It's not about who dies with more, it's about who lived the most. ~ Teresa R. Funke, Bursts Of Brilliance For A Creative Life Blog

I started producing out of necessity. It's not that I want to become a full time producer, but it gives me control over my creative life. ~ Michelle Glick

In those who rest on their unshakable faith, pharisaism and fanaticism are the unmistakable symptoms of doubt which has been repressed. Doubt is not overcome by repression but by courage. Courage does not deny that there is doubt, but it takes the doubt into itself as an expression of its own finitude and affirms the content of an ultimate concern. Courage does not need the safety of an unquestionable conviction. It includes the risk without which no creative life is possible. ~ Paul Tillich

Friends who love you and have warmth for your creative life are the very best suns in the world. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

What if you wake up some day, and you're 65 ... and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life? ~ Anne Lamott

..."living in oneness with Buddha's teaching, is a creative life in which everything becomes meaningful. ~ Gyomay M. Kubose

You know, people see [August: Osage County], and I tell them that it's based on my family, and they assume that I came from some kind of horrible, hysterical circumstances. That's not true. My family, my nuclear family, was actually very close. My mom and dad were great parents and they encouraged a real rich, creative life for me and my brothers. My extended family, like every family, has some darkness, and some violence of some kind, emotional or otherwise, in their past. ~ Tracy Letts

Even without success, creative persons find joy in a job well done. Learning for its own sake is rewarding. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi