#creativity

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

Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living ↗

— John Cage

#creativity #art

When I am ..... completely myself, entirely alone... or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these ideas come I know not nor can I force them. ↗

— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

#ideas #music #music

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do. ↗

— Steve Martin

#life

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: 'Avoid them like the plague.' Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché. ↗

— Khaled Hosseini

#writing #nature

Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak..surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#writing #teacher

The greater puzzle of universal wisdom and beauty that we have strived to honor through our work includes the profound legacies of world artistic and spiritual traditions, the innate integrity of human communities where people seek to live in social harmony, and that regenerative stream of life sustained upon the earth itself as it spins through the cosmos to the music of the spheres. ↗

— Luther E. Vann

#art #art-books #beauty #communities #creativity

I was not sure where I was going, and I could not see what I would do when I got [there]. But you saw further and clearer than I, and you opened the seas before my ship, whose track led me across the waters to a place I had never dreamed of, and which you were even then preparing to be my rescue and my shelter and my home. ↗

— Thomas Merton

#god #guidance #life-plan #dreams

The basket would never make her famous or end up in a museum. The best part of it was the making of it, sitting at the table weaving while outside the lake crashed into shore and the seagulls roosted somewhere for the night and two women stopped for a moment to watch. ↗

— Ellen Airgood

#creativity #inspiration #art