384 Creation Quotes

If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you'd build a castle at the beach. You're just taking your hands and you're mounting up sand.

The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas.

The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet's greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body.

About six months ago, I listened to Siamese Dream. That was the first time I'd ever really heard my own album, because I had separated from the experience of making the record. And it really moved me. It made me cry, it's so beautiful.

In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature.

No matter how substandard you feel your skill or talent may be, If you never produce your art, the world will always remain deprived of it.

The entire 'my art is better than your art' thing really gets under my skin. The fact of the matter is: Your art IS better than my art... at being what it is. So what? It just so happens that my art is better than your art, at being what it is.

A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth.

How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.

In the beginning there was nothing. God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.

There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.

Everyone should be able to build, and as long as this freedom to build does not exist, the present-day planned architecture cannot be considered art at all.

The books I write because I want to read them, the games because I want to play them, and stories I tell because I find them exciting personally.

The truth is that economic competition is the very opposite of competition in the animal kingdom. It is not a competition in the grabbing off of scarce nature-given supplies, as it is in the animal kingdom. Rather, it is a competition in the positive creation of new and additional wealth.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.

Nature is none other than God in things... Animals and plants are living effects of Nature; Whence all of God is in all things... Think thus, of the sun in the crocus, in the narcissus, in the heliotrope, in the rooster, in the lion.

To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.

God is indeed dead. He died of self-horror when He saw the creature He had made in His own image.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

All that you accomplish or fail to accomplish with your life is the direct result of your thoughts.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

So God stepped over to the edge of the world And He spat out the seven seas; He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed; He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled; And the waters above the earth came down, The cooling waters came down.

With his head in his hands, God thought and thought, Till he thought: I'll make me a man!

This Great God, Like a mammy bending over her baby, Kneeled down in the dust Toiling over a lump of clay Till He shaped it in His own image.

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

When I want to play music, you've got to get me on tape or else it goes.

There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.

I wrote a song, but I can't read music so I don't know what it is. Every once in a while I'll be listening to the radio and I say, 'I think I might have written that.'

Scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that never has been.

And I made a rural pen, And I stained the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright in the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Nature is but a name for an effect, Whose cause is God.

A sculptor wields The chisel, and the stricken marble grows To beauty.

Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece.

Shoot the bitch and write a book. That's what I did.

To work and create 'for nothing,' to sculpture in clay, to know one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries - this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, it the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.

Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the staggering evidence of man's sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile. It calls for a daily effort, self-mastery, a precise estimate of the limits of truth, measure, and strength. It constitutes an ascesis. All that 'for nothing,' in order to repeat and mark time. But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.

Creating is living doubly.

No great work has ever been based on hatred or contempt... Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and this is its whole secret.

To work and create 'for nothing,' to sculpture in clay, to know that one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries - this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.

We must accept the dangers: the era of chairbound artists is over. But we must reject the bitterness ... Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. In this methodological uncertainty, one might suppose that there were any number of possible systems of theoretical physics all equally well justified; and this opinion is no doubt correct, theoretically. But the development of physics has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest.

Ideas must be put to the test. That's why we make things, otherwise they would be no more than ideas. There is often a huge difference between an idea and its realisation. I've had what I thought were great ideas that just didn't work. Sometimes it's difficult to say if something has worked or not. Photography is a way of putting distance between myself and the work which sometimes helps me to see more clearly what it is that I have made.

A writer can't know everything about what she writes. It's impossible. You reach deep down and you bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book but you don't know everything about it. You can't.

In fact the opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.

I believe that any 'awareness' of life is 'spiritual' since awareness can only be a quality of the spirit not of the material world or of matter and machines. Only a spiritual being has awareness. But if you mean 'spiritual' in the sense of a kind of 'celebration of Life', then yes, I write music to celebrate life. I think most artists do, no matter how they themselves describe it. It's the joy of creating. It's a way of life.

You won't catch me driving a race car that I have built. (This remark was obviously tongue-in-cheek, as numerous photos exist of Chapman driving racing cars he built.)

fierce unrest seethes at the core, of all existing things:, it was the eager wish to soar, that gave the gods their wings.

Art is a mystery. A mystery is something immeasurable. In so far as every child and woman and man may be immeasurable, art is the mystery of every man and woman and child. In so far as a human being is an artist, skies and mountains and oceans and thunderbolts and butterflies are immeasurable; and art is every mystery of nature. Nothing measurable can be alive; nothing which is not alive can be art; nothing which cannot be art is true: and everything untrue doesn't matter a very good God damn...

Final Ruin fiercely drives Her plowshare o'er creation.

No stream rises higher than its source. Whatever man might build, could never express or reflect more than he was. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built.

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.

Glory be to God for dappled things- For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

For human nature, being more highly pitched, selved, and distinctive than anything in the world, can have been developed, evolved, condensed, from the vastness of the world not anyhow or by the working of common powers but only by one of finer or higher pitch and determination than itself.

I'm a writer and this is what I love to do. There's no reason that just because you're a celebrity, you can't write.

My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not lost - that it is born again, perhaps in some form which seems hardly at first recognizable, but nevertheless, there it is, born again. As poets we do not ask permission before we begin to practise, for there is no authority to license us. We do not inquire whether it is still possible to pen a drama, for the answer to that question is ours alone to give. It is our drama, spoken or sung, that asserts our right to the title of poet. It is our decision that counts, and not the opinion of some theatre management, or the ponderings of the critic, or even the advice of our friendliest mentors. It is our decision, our assertion, that alters the whole state of affairs.

When our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own.

We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back; we die in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death! But as soon as we are born we begin the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life; we are born in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of ephemeral life is immortality! In the temporary living organism these two streams collide ... both opposing forces are holy. It is our duty, therefore, to grasp that vision which can embrace and harmonize these two enormous, timeless, and indestructible forces, and with this vision to modulate our thinking and our action.

How does the light of a star set out and plunge into black eternity in its immortal course? The star dies, but the light never dies; such also is the cry of freedom. Out of the transient encounter of contrary forces which constitute your existence, strive to create whatever immortal thing a mortal may create in this world - a Cry. And this Cry, abandoning to the earth the body which gave it birth, proceeds and labors eternally.

Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be. We can then say, with Joyce, Welcome, 0 life! We go for the millionth time to forge in the smithy of our souls the uncreated conscience of the race.

I seek a form that my style cannot discover, a bud of thought that wants to be a rose.

A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.

I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.

Mickey Mouse is, to me, a symbol of independence. He was a means to an end. He popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner. Born of necessity, the little fellow literally freed us of immediate worry. He provided the means for expanding our organization to its present dimensions and for extending the medium of cartoon animation toward new entertainment levels. He spelled production liberation for us.

I tell you there is no such thing as creative hate!

Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Gave thee life and bid thee feed By the stream and o'er the mead; Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing, woolly bright.

When the stars threw down their spears, And water'd heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

The friends that have it I do wrong Whenever I remake a song Should know what issue is at stake, It is myself that I remake.

Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode: Before you were, or any hearts to beat, Weary and kind one lingered by His seat; He made the world to be a grassy road Before her wandering feet.

It comforts me to think that if we are created beings, the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality, and so it would seem to us, look out from within our reality, that is would contradict reason. But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater that reality, or it would not be reasonable.

Translated: 'Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.'

And so I am an American and I have lived half my life in Paris, not the half that made me but the half in which I made what I made.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

Can any thing in this world be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth can come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!

Sighing that Nature formed but one such man, And broke the die, in molding Sheridan.

The only reason why God created man is because he was disappointed with the monkey.

A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity.

Auld Nature swears, the lovely dears Her noblest work she classes, O: Her prentice han' she tried on man, An' then she made the lasses, O.

Mother, though my song's measure is like your surf-beat's ancient rhythm I never learned it of you. Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain.

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore-defeated Challengers of oblivion Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down, The square-limbed Roman letters Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain.

The God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.[2]

In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire?

Be, beget, begone.

A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape. Likewise, a man's sole creation is strengthened in its successive and multiple aspects: his works. One after another they complement one another, correct or overtake one another, contradict one another, too. If something brings creation to an end, it is not the victorious and illusory cry of the blinded artist: 'I have said everything,' but the death of the creator which closes his experiences and the book of his genius. That effort, that superhuman consciousness are not necessarily apparent to the reader. There is no mystery in human creation. Will performs this miracle. But at least there is no true creation without a secret. To be true, a succession of works can be but a series of approximations of the same thought. But it is possible to conceive of another type of creator proceeding by juxtaposition. Their words may seem to be devoid of inter-relations, to a certain degree, they are contradictory. But viewed all together, they resume their natural groupings.

Alternately: We the willing, led by the unknowing, have done so much, with so little, for so long, that we are now qualified to make anything out of nothing.