Creative Act Quotes

#1. I don't care what I do - act, stand-up, write, direct - it doesn't matter as long as I'm being creative and it's good work.

Jeff Garlin

#2. In this world is not the creative act of the genius always a protest against the inertia of the mass?

Adolf Hitler

#3. Creativeness is liberation from slavery. Man is free when he finds himself in a state of creative activity. Creativeness leads to ecstasy of the moment. The products of creativeness are within time, but the creative act itself lies outside time.

Nikolai Berdyaev

#4. Your reactions, whether positive or negative, are creative of future circumstances. In your imagination, you can hear words congratulating you on getting a wonderful new job. That imaginal act now goes forward and you will encounter this pleasant experience in the future.

Neville Goddard

#5. I believe that both art and the human striving for cognitive comprehension are manifest forms of the grand game in which nothing more is stipulated than the game's rules; both art and actively solicited perceptions are but special cases of the recurring creative act to which we owe our existence.

Konrad Lorenz

#6. Every creative act, however small, enriches our species and the world around us. To find and nurture talent, is to be truly wealthy.

Stewart Stafford

#7. Sleep conceals the creative act while the objective world reveals it. In sleep man impresses the subconscious with his conception of himself.

Neville Goddard

#8. But as a Scot with a lifelong love of Scotland and the arts, I believe the opportunity of independence is too good to miss. Simply put there is no more creative an act than creating a new nation.

Sean Connery

#9. The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight.

Twyla Tharp

#10. The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

Marcel Duchamp

#11. When we dream with the courage of our soul, we dream sacred dreams - fresh, creative, and able to infuse us with passion and courage to act.

Alberto Villoldo

#12. Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is a supreme creative act.

Ram Dass

#13. Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?

Andrei Tarkovsky

#14. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. And I really believe that. And what I try to teach young people, or anybody in any creative field, is that every idea should seemingly be outrageous.

George Lois

#15. I just love to act. It's my favorite thing to do in the world, and what keeps it interesting, to me, is the creative challenge. So, different kinds of characters, that's what I just love to do.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#16. If I'd waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started "being creative," well, I'd still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it's in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.

Austin Kleon

#17. Getting sober is a radically creative act.

Meredith Bell

#18. The degree of talent, the size of the gift, is immaterial. All artists must listen, but not all hear great symphonies, see wide canvasses, conceive complex, character-filled novels. No
matter, the creative act is the same, and it is an act of faith.

Madeleine L'Engle

#19. Every creative act is an act of hypocrisy and violence. You may have to think about it for a while, but I am sure you can discover your own.

Mary Ruefle

#20. I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Norman Mailer

#21. If we could stop thinking of 'meaning' and 'purpose' as artifacts of some divine creative act and see them instead as the yield of our own creative future, they become goals, intentions and processes very much in reach rather than the shadows of childlike, superstitious mythology.

Douglas Rushkoff

#22. To the extent a person makes, invents or thinks something that is new to him, he may be said to have performed a creative act.

Margaret Mead

#23. What is your idea of you? Who is it that you have decided to become? If your greatest work of art is the life you live, and ultimately life is a creative act, what life will you choose to leave behind as your masterpiece?

Erwin Raphael McManus

#24. Truly creative people care little about what they have done, and a lot about what they are doing.

Alan Cohen

#25. Failure is built into creativity ... the creative act involves this element of 'newness' and 'experimentalism,' then one must expect and accept the possibility of failure.

Saul Bass

#26. Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act.

Carl Jung

#27. In its essence, a meal is a creative act that has its genesis in the mind of someone who cares enough to plan it, gather ingredients and labor over its creation.

Andi Ashworth

#28. I have my own dance and production companies, and acting is my creative outlet. It's what I'm passionate about. I've actually created a lifestyle where I could act for free. I could get a job to pay the bills and act on the weekends to make me smile.

Brian J. White

#29. What if the creative act is not an act against God but a reflection of His image within us?

Erwin Raphael McManus

#30. A willingness to let go of an old self and allow creative thoughts to remake a person into a better version of oneself requires an act of courage.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#31. In the creative act, you kind of reach down and look for things that will, when put together, create an emotional effect.

David Gray

#32. Each creative act is the universe incarnating itself as one, and there is nothing above it by way of final condition.

Alfred North Whitehead

#33. I keep my stand-up comedy notes in a pile on my desk. I don't organize my act. I keep myself in a state of confusion. It stresses me out, but I prefer creative chaos.

Joy Behar

#34. Is it possible that the creative act is simply the materialization of the future- making the invisible, visible?

Erwin McManus

#35. I felt giving birth was the most creative act of all my creative acts - literally creation!

Sam Taylor-Wood

#36. Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense - the creative act.

Kenneth Rexroth

#37. The most dangerous of our impulses reign in ourselves against ourselves. To dissolve them is a creative act.

Hugo Von Hofmannsthal

#38. In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions.

Marcel Duchamp

#39. So every creative act strives to attain an absolute status; it longs to create a world of beauty to triumph over chaos and convert it to order.

Rowan Williams

#40. The making of thoughts is the most common instance of human participation in the creative act.

Frank Barron

#41. The creative act does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, and skills.

Arthur Koestler

#42. It may be tripe, but it's my tripe - and I do urge other authors to resist encroachments on their brain-children and trust their own judgment rather than that of some zealous meddler with a diploma in creative punctuation who is just dying to get into the act.

George MacDonald Fraser

#43. Once you accept the power of spine in the creative act, you will become much more efficient in your creativity. You will still get lost on occasion, but having a spine will anchor you.

Twyla Tharp

#44. Seeing is in itself a creative act which requires effort.

Henri Matisse

#45. The sexual stage invites lovers to become whoever they want, enticed with endless possibilities of characters, roles, situations and scenarios to play-act. It is a chance for us to trade in our self-imposed labels and everyday identity for something a little more adventurous.

Miya Yamanouchi

#46. The event, in its emergence, poses its own premises, determining that they were the conditions for its realization. This transition is always the result of a salto mortale, which is a creative act in the sense that it gives the preceding links in the chain of events their meaning.

Stathis Kouvelakis

#47. Be serious. You've got to do the job you were hired to do well, but there's always more you can do. When I was an assistant, I would say to myself, 'You may not be an executive, but act like one.' I would volunteer for any creative assignment - read scripts, do 'coverage,' write notes.

Stacey Snider

#48. The creative process must be explored ... as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves.

Rollo May

#49. I am more and more convinced that true revolutionaries must perceive the revolution, because of its creative and liberating nature, as an act of love. For me, the revolution, which is not possible without a theory of revolution - and therefore science - is not irreconcilable with love.

Che Guevera

#50. It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

Arthur Erickson

#51. The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write ... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up.

Chris Van Allsburg

#52. Now that I'm staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I'm less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for creative writing.

David Knopfler

#53. The way I work is not the way that you work, and the whole point of any creative act is that. What I have to offer is me, what you have to offer is you, and if you offer yourself with authenticity and generosity I will be moved.

Charlie Kaufman

#54. The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.

Rollo May

#55. There is a ruthlessness to the creative act. It often involves a betrayal of the status quo.

Alan Watt

#56. Love is an act of art ... It is this creative quality of love, that it seeks to reshape the world for its sake and to create happiness, which makes love radical and potentially seditious ... the inverse is also true: art is an act of love.

Rod Dubey

#57. Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.

Frederick Henry Hedge

#58. The dark net is a world of power and freedom: of expression, of creativity, of information, of ideas. Power and freedom endow our creative and our destructive faculties. The dark net magnifies both, making it easier to explore every desire, to act on every dark impulse, to indulge every neurosis.

Jamie Bartlett

#59. As any mom knows, having a baby is an extremely creative act and to love and create a baby, it's on par with any other creative act that we could come up with.

Ani DiFranco

#60. Creative people have to believe in the value of their work. If you don't have any belief then you can't give anything - designing is an act of giving, and a belief in the value of the work fuels the desire to express something. It's important to know what your values are and to take care of them.

Peter Saville

#61. Preparing citizens to act thoughtfully to create a more just, open, and creative society gives form, substance and meaning to often abstract concepts of freedom and democracy.

Gregory S. Prince Jr.

#62. Man is happiest when he is creating. In fact, the highest state of which man is capable lies in the creative act.

Leo Buscaglia

#63. It is imperative to bear in mind that human creativity is not a claim or a right on the part of man, but God's claim on and call to man. God awaits man's creative act, which is the response to the creative act of God.

Nikolai Berdyaev

#64. Away with all ideals. Let each individual act spontaneously from the forever incalculable prompting of the creative wellhead within him. There is no universal law.

D.H. Lawrence

#65. I root myself and my worship curation in the knowledge that because God is the ultimate creator, then everything we do imperfectly but sincerely reflects that ultimate creative act and its originator.

Jonny Baker

#66. It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it.

Robert Motherwell

#67. I got into acting because I wanted to act and I love acting. That's my true north: to be creative and to be challenged in what I love to do.

Mark Ruffalo

#68. If one draws things in a manner which provides only the barest clue to their meaning, the viewer is forced to fill in the gaps by using his own imagination. He is compelled to participate in the creative act, which I consider very important.

Antoni Tapies

#69. Any human act that gives rise to something new is referred to as a creative act, regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#70. Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.

George Lois

#71. Because it is a radical act of freedom, creative achievement is a heroic process that requires, in all its permutations, specific strengths of character.

Robert Grudin

#72. The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#73. The idea of infinity cannot be expressed in words or even described, but it can be apprehended through art, which makes infinity tangible. The absolute is only attainable through faith and in the creative act.

Andrei Tarkovsky

#74. I would say that the "masterpiece" was the creative act itself and not a particular work which happened to please a large audience and be accepted as the very body of Christ.

Henry Miller

#75. The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.

Nadine Gordimer

#76. We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#77. I can act ... I do a little writing as well. And I'm good at typing. I'm a creative typist, actually.

Chris Colfer

#78. How we respond to what happens to us - especially the painful, excruciating things that we never wanted and we have no control over - is a creative act.

Rob Bell

#79. It is almost impossible to reconcile self expression with the creative act.

Charles Eames

#80. The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

Joy Harjo

#81. The recalling of beautiful things, whether they are your own experiences or the acheivements of others, is a creative act. Simple ideas can be restated by rote; but profound ideas must be recreated by will and imagination.

Robert Grudin

#82. Give your difference, welcome my difference, unify all difference in the larger whole - such is the law of growth. The unifying of difference is the eternal process of life - the creative synthesis, the highest act of creation, the at-onement.

Mary Parker Follett

#83. By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death.

Rollo May

#84. Experience, the interpreter between creative nature and the human race, teaches the action of nature among mortals: how under the constraint of necessity she cannot act otherwise than as reason, who steers her helm, teaches her to act.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#85. Does not the very word 'creative' mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act - rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life - not death.

Berenice Abbott

#86. Of all the creative acts performed by the artist, the most directly legible is drawing ... it is the act that is most directly and spontaneously governed by his nervous and muscular system.

Rene Huyghe

#87. To tell the truth is a super avantguarde creative act

El Roto

#88. It could be argued that the reaction to a work of art is a creative act which is the counterpart of the action of the artist.

Frank Willett

#89. Theater is the crucible where we can create the dynamics of life without suffering the flames of their combustion.

Tom Althouse

#90. Reading a good comic is a creative act. Watching a film is often a more passive experience, and since I'm interested in engaging that conversational aspect of creativity, I'm trying to find ways of achieving that in my films.

Dave McKean

#91. questions hold the power to cause us to think, create answers we believe in, and motivate us to act on our ideas. Asking moves us beyond passive acceptance of what others say, or staying stuck in present circumstances, to aggressively applying our creative ability to the problem.

Tony Stoltzfus

#92. During every really creative act, the artist finds himself homeless. To overcome this state he has to call up his last reserves of strength.

Asger Jorn

#93. Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.

Douglas Coupland

#94. Every creative act involves a new innocence or perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief.

Arthur Koestler

#95. Half of the pleasure of painting and feeling the joy of the creative act is sharing it with others and the feeling of connection. It could just be the colour. But it is something that someone other than you has seen and felt. It is momentous. It is magic.

Sara Genn

#96. The creative act is not pure.

Nadine Gordimer

#97. I'm excited about the idea of an act of theatre triggering a parallel creative act of writing.

Tim Crouch

#98. By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death.

Rollo May

#99. Art has something to do with beauty. The act of creating beauty pulls the portion of your soul to the surface that is true to the way you were created.

Timothy Simpson

#100. The right creative act makes its own laws, and always will do.

John Piper