Creativity

• art
• books
• creativity
• misc

art

• Art is not a thing; it is a way.
  --- Elbert Hubbard

• Every child is an artist. The problem is who to remain an artist once he grows up.
  --- Pablo Picasso

• Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled and utterly bewildered.
  --- Al Capp

• Art is the difference between seeing and just identifying.
  --- Jean Mary Norman

• With an apple I will astonish Paris
  --- Paul Cezanne

• Less is more.
  --- Mies van der Rohe

• Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
  --- Pablo Picasso

• Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.
  --- Robert Motherwell

• No art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament, I know nothing.
  --- Edgar Degas

• Artists can color the sky red because they know its blue. Those of us who aren’t artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we’re stupid.
  --- Jules Feiffer

• Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
  --- Simonides

• It is better to paint form memory, for thus your work will be your own; your sensation, your intelligence, and your soul will triumph over the eye of the amateur ... Do not finish your work too much.
  --- Paul Gauguin

• [The object of painting is] not to reflect the visible but to make visible.
  --- Paul Klee

• What has reason to do with the art of painting?
  --- William blake

books

• The books I haven’t written are better than the books other people have.
  --- Cyril V. Connolly

• These are not books. lumps of lifeless paper, but...far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.
  --- Gilbert Highet

• An ordinary man can ... surround himself with two thousand books ... and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.
  --- Augustine Birrell

• I am a part of all I read.
  --- John Kieran

• Show me the books he loves and I shall know
  The man far better than through mortal friends
  --- S. Weir Mitchell

• A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face ... It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy
  --- Edward P. Morgan

• When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.
  --- Desiderius Erasmus

• To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
  --- Edmund Burke

• In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read ... It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
  --- S. I. Hayakawa

• The way a book is read - which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book - can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it ... Anyone who can read can learn how to read deeply and thus live more fully.
  --- Norman Cousins

• Every man who know how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting.
  --- Aldous Huxley

• Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
  --- Sir Richard Steele

• If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
  --- Ralph Waldo Emerson

• When you read a classic, you do not see more in the book that you did before; you see more in you than there was before.
  --- Clifton Fadiman

• The very abundance of books in our days - a stupefying and terrifying abundance - has made it more important to know how to choose… the first piece of advice I will venture to give you is this: Read only the best books … Let not an hour… be wasted on a third-rate or second-rate stuff if first-rate can be had.
  --- James Bryce

• When you find that a book is poor… waste no more time upon it.
  --- James Bryce

• Books are the best of things, well used. Abused, among the worst.
  --- Ralph Waldo Emerson

• The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.
  --- James Bryce

• Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message to us from the dead - from human souls we never say, who lived, perhaps thousands of miles away. And yet there, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us s brothers.
  --- Charles Kingsley.

• You may have tangible wealth untold;
  Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold
  Richer than I you can never be -
  I had a mother who read to me.
  --- Strickland Gillilian

• I suppose every scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there; but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again.
  --- Ralph Waldo Emerson

• O for a book and a shady nook,
  Either indoors or out;
  With the green leaves whispering overhead,
  Or the street cries all about.
  Where I may read all at my ease
  Both of the new and old;
  For a jolly good book whereon to look
  Is better to me than gold
  --- Old English Ryme

creativity

• The great creative individual ... is capable f more wisdom and virtue than collective man ever can be.
  --- John Stuart Mill

• Personally, would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
  --- Stephen Leacock

• 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 come I know not nor can I force them ... Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear the gleich alles zusammen (at the same time all together).
  --- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

• Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training.
  --- Anna Freud

misc

• The best ideas come after you think you've run out of them.
  --- Dove Chocolate

• It may be those who do most, dream most.
  --- Stephan Leacock

• Imagination is more important than knowledge.
   --- Albert Einstein

• If you can imagine it; you can achieve it. If you can dream it; you can become it.
  --- WIlliam Arthur Ward

• In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play;
  --- Friedrich Nietzshe

• It is a luxury to be understood.
  --- Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Be obscure clearly.
  --- EB White

• Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

• Insanity springs eternal in the gifted brain

• I don’t suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!!!

• Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.
  --- Charles F. Kettering

• Want is the mistress of invention.
  --- Susanna Centlivre

• Invention breeds invention.
  --- Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Invention is the mother of necessity.
  --- Thorstein Veblen

• The computer is a moron.
  --- Peter Drucker

• Lo! Men have become tools of their tools.
  --- Henry David Thoreau

last updated: April 8