#creativity

If you're alive, you're creative. ↗

— Patti Digh

#creativity #encouragement-and-attitude #attitude

All life is death. You don't fool yourself about this anymore. You slash at the perfect canvas with strokes of paint and replace the perfect picture of your imagination with the reality of what you are capable of. From death, and sorrow, and compromise, you create. This is what it means, you finally realize, to be alive. ("The Chambered Fruit") ↗

— M. Rickert

#creativity #death #imagination #life #art

Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made [the record], but he couldn't just march into a recording studio and start howling. He'd have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the rage, tame it and shape it so that it could be contained in the tight-fitting songs. Then he had to dress it up so that it sounded more like itself. ↗

— Nick Hornby

#creativity #music #songwriting #art

As you take the normal opportunities of your daily life and create something of beauty and helpfulness, you improve not only the world around you but also the world within you. ↗

— Dieter F. Uchtdorf

#beauty

It is hard to see how a great man can be an atheist. Without the sustaining influence of faith in a divine power we could have little faith in ourselves. We need to feel that behind us is intelligence and love. Doubters do not achieve; skeptics do not contribute; cynics do not create. Faith is the great motive power, and no man realizes his full possibilities unless he has the deep conviction that life is eternally important, and that his work, well done, is a part of an unending plan. ↗

— Calvin Coolidge

#creativity #faith #god #faith

Almost nothing beautiful or brilliant happens unless a person has thought about it a lot. ↗

— Eric Maisel

#thought #beauty

O Divine Poesy, goddess, daughter of Zeus, sustain for me this song of the various-minded man who, after he had plundered the innermost citadel of hallowed Troy, was made to stay grievously about the coasts of men, the sport of their customs, good and bad, while his heart, through all the sea-faring, ached with an agony to redeem himself and bring his company safe home. Vain hope – for them. The fools! Their own witlessness cast them aside. To destroy for meat the oxen of the most exalted Sun, wherefore the Sun-god blotted out the day of their return. Make this tale live for us in all its many bearings, O Muse.” – from Homer’s Odyssey, translation by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) ↗

— Steven Pressfield

#creativity #prayer #men

Editors can be stupid at times. They just ignore that author’s intention. I always try to read unabridged editions, so much is lost with cut versions of classic literature, even movies don’t make sense when they are edited too much. I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author’s mind, a glimpse of their creative soul. I mean, how would people like it if editors came along and said to an artist, ‘Whoops, you left just a tad too much space around that lily pad there, lets crop that a bit, shall we?’. Monet would be ripping his hair out. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#creative-process #creative-reading #creative-thinking #creativity #editing

To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense. ↗

— Henry Ford

#history #innovation #men

You came here because we do this better than you and part of that is letting our creatives be unproductive until they are. ↗

— Don Draper

#mad-men #process #men