Thursday, March 12, 2009

Significant Quotes on Creativity for Today

There is a scream within each one of us to truly become the one person we’re made to be--the true us or “me”. We forever search and struggle to gain the key to ourselves, to our own sense of creativity and nostalgia of cause and inventiveness. These quotes below can help us find that person.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
–Albert Einstein.

One is almost certainly taken for granted; whereas the other is basically linear add the effort. Imagination is elusive and frustratingly leaves us at times when we most need it. We do want for knowledge but then again we can get it. Imagination is mystical.

“I do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all.”
–William Blake.

There is a real sense that we are gifted with our thoughts, that they come to us, and this is a mystery--a pleasant and serendipitous ambiguity. What we find mystical we tend to worship.

“Your real duty is to save your dream.”
–Amedeo Modigliani.

Why do we get lost? We lose our way because we surrender the most intrinsic part of ourselves for something cheap, false and incongruent. Workplaces do this to people routinely. So does the consumer world. The dream drives the passion--and not one of us is devoid of the dream.

“In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Paradoxically, our greatest work involves the things we’d cast away without a moment’s thought. We’d never have seen it but for pure luck. Creativity is, after all, logical in hindsight.

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
–Albert Einstein.

How many choose mental mediocrity? How many still give up on life, mentally, emotionally and spiritually because they’ve been hurt and they risk no more? The cold and perhaps hard person, no longer often soft to the heart, finds it a better proposition to see the inevitable negative in everything, forever stifling the creative genius that exudes out of life. We pinpoint these people in a second. Each of us knows them.

“To be great is to be misunderstood.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson.

We’ve been leading toward courage for some time, and now we arrive there. To be creative we must in a sense be prepared to run counter to the mob, or even to the person of influence and power--we can’t please and still change things, or be the impetus for change. Courage is required to maintain the pluck of the venture within our hearts and minds.

A final thought...

There’s a conspiracy out there, and you, even you, believe it to be real, don’t you. They’re after you; they’re after me... they, the bureaucrats, the officers of conscience, the thought police; they seek to expunge creativity, kill it no less. They do it in overt and covert ways. Fear drives this. We work via the stealth of faith to resist them; finding time for, and allowing creativity to seep out of us, to some good effect on the outside world.

Protect it and nurture it, this creativity... we must. It’s part of our life force.

Copyright © 2009, S. J. Wickham. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Here's an interesting quote on creativity I saw recently ... "Copying one person is called plagarism copying many we call research" (Albert Einstein). Thanks for this thought provoking post Steve.