Quotes by Philosophers - Page 219

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.
Albert Camus
Those who loved with all their heart and mind and might have always thought of death, and those who knew the endless nights of harrowing concern for others have longed for it. The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worthwhile and death welcome. There is no other life I should prefer. Neither should I like not to die." (The Faith of a Heretic)
Walter Kaufmann
For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is constantly ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking. He must create if he can, first and foremost, especially if his creation does not side-step the problems of his time.
Albert Camus
On Pilgrim's Progress: “I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colors.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Even though artists of all kinds claim to put their hearts and souls into their works, it will only confuse you, for example, if you try to discern a painter by his paintings. His masterpiece may be the master because of its iridescence; it may display a hundred different perspectives through his single face.
Criss Jami
In the religious myths, the creative will appears personified in God, and man already feels himself guilty when he assumes himself to be like God, that is, to ascribe this will to himself. In the heroic myths on the contrary, man appears as himself, creative and guilt for his suffering and fall is ascribed to God, that is, to his own will. Both are only extreme reaction phenomena of man wavering between his Godlikeness and his nothingness, whose will is awakened to the knowledge of its power and whose consciousness is aroused to terror before it.
Otto Rank
If you cannot create, then buy a company that can. In particular, the large corporations buy small, personnally owned companies that have made breakthroughs in particular areas. They are buying creativity, though the immediate rush this produces doesn't last long. Once integrated into an administrative atmosphere, the creativity is sucked out of them.(IV - From Managers and Speculators to Growth)
John Ralston Saul
When I stay in one Place, I can hardly think at all; my body had to be on the move to set my mind going." Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Today, the world rewards those with creative and intellectual muscles. So, women and skinny men need to shut up and start thinking.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A blank cheque kills creativity.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The aesthetic construct, and nothing else, has taught us to expose ourselves to a non-enslaving experience of rank differences. The work of art is even allowed to 'tell' us, those who have run away from form, something, because it quite obviously does not embody the intention to confine us. 'La poesie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose' Something that exposes itself and proves itself in this test gains unpresumed authority. In the space of aesthetic simulation, which is at once the emergency space for the success and failure of the artistic construct, the powerless superiority of the works can affect observers who otherwise take pains to ensure that they have no lord, old or new, above them.
Peter Sloterdijk
Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.
Eric Hoffer
It's a wonderful paradox: only when you have a changeless sense of who you are, can real changes take place. It is the ground of your absolute value and everything that is truly worthwhile.
Ilchi Lee
For certain you can be helped, should you accept it. But as far as being made...no one can do that. This occurred on the day you were born. An earth day is not a birth day. Own what you create as well as what you break.
T.F. Hodge
And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cogwheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves....On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness; all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also, and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon him.
John Ruskin
Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.
Colin Wilson
Yes, be different, but not for the vanities of being different.
Criss Jami
The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.
Blaise Pascal
Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.
Arthur Schopenhauer
In the time of to Augustine, the conversation in the West mostly had been a Christian reaction to outside ideas. After Augustine, the Great Conversation would be about his ideas for centuries.
John Mark Reynolds
I will admit that we as young rebels always wanted fundamentalists to understand our take on their religion, but rarely, if ever, the other way around. The fundamentalists are the real artists. If you saw only a masterpiece of an original painting and someone threw a splash of red across it saying that their version is better, you would be offended too.
Criss Jami
Pseudo-artists think that being an artist means opposing whatever seems to be an establishment. That is not creative at all. True creativity is the ability to gain perspective wherever you may have missed it before.
Criss Jami
(As Plato:) There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable.
Rebecca Goldstein
One who enjoys finding errors will then start creating errors to find.
Criss Jami
I enjoy poetry where I can talk as bizarre as I please, but theology or philosophy, I always respect the truth by taking it a step further.
Criss Jami
Appreciate the creation, respect the creator of it, and admire the source of all creativity.
T.F. Hodge
Selfish DreamscapesIf you have a dream, as you should, relish in being selfish about building every passionate aspect of it. The crowd of spectators and consumers will still be exactly where you left them... gossiping about everybody else's dream but their own.
T.F. Hodge
We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs.
Bertrand Russell
Because we want to be inwardly secure, we are constantly seeking methods and means for this security, and thereby we create authority, the worship of another, which destroys comprehension, that spontaneous tranquility of mind in which alone there can be a state of creativeness.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
There must be a certain amount of imitation, copying, in outward technique, but when there is inward, psychological imitation surely we cease to be creative.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The central point of the work of art is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching.
Maurice Blanchot
Rather than being medicalized or romanticized, mental disorders, or mental dis-eases, should be understood as nothing less or more than what they are, an expression of our deepest human nature. By recognizing their traits in ourselves and reflecting upon them, we may be able both to contain them and to put them to good use. This is, no doubt, the highest form of genius.
Neel Burton
Above and beyond all else it must be borne in mind that hatred tends to dry up the springs of creative thought in the life of the hater, so that his resourcefulness becomes completely focused on the negative aspects of his environment. The urgent needs of the personality for creative expression are starved to death. A man's horizon may become so completely dominated by the intense character of his hatred that there remains no creative residue in his mind and spirit to give to great ideas, to great concepts.
Howard Thurman
There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it
Alain de Botton
Fashion is simply a guideline for style-less people to appear stylish.
Criss Jami
A genius masters the art of observation, and unites with the source of imagination to create advancements in the cause for human evolution.
T.F. Hodge
Whether you try too hard to fit in or you try too hard to stand out, it is of equal consequence: you exhaust your significance.
Criss Jami
Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!
Immanuel Kant
Life in itself has no meaning. Life is an opportunity to create meaning.
Osho
Everybody is born creative, but very few people remain creative.
Osho
Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains.
Henri Bergson
I am not covetous, but as ambitious as ever any of my sex was, is, or can be; which makes, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power, time, not occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not be mistress of one, since Fortune and Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own; for which nobody, I hope, will blame me, since it is in everyone's power to do the like.
Margaret Cavendish
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.The more you look the more you see.
Robert M. Pirsig
...the preparations for working put him simultaneously in the right frame of mind for creating... that collectedness and presence of mind...the right frame of mind for the artist is only reached when the preparing and the creating, the technical and the artistic, the material and the spiritual, the project and the object, flow together without a break.
Eugen Herrigel
When I write sometimes I strike gold, sometimes I labor in vain and keep producing rubbish
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Don't believe in everything that is written. Not everything that is written is true
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Writing is magic happening on paper
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Every book is worth reading. If it cannot make you wiser it will make you a critic
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Today almost everybody is a writer, the enormous publish button on blogs and websites begs you everywhere to click on it! And bam you are a writer. To hell with agents and publishing houses and rejection letters. Immortality for you is on the click of a mouth! We are advancing at the speed of light! You can become an author at 140 characters. To hell with long winding sentences and long hours of scratching the head, the immortals of today instantly get a "like" and they instantly enter the pantheon! They seat side by side Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, St Paul, Buddha, Martin Luther, Rousseau, Bangambiki…
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Writing is self-pleasure
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Writing is all about self-expression, we want to speak up, to get it off our chest. Whether we make an impact or not that is not for us to decide
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If I had time, money and knowledge I could write about everything; but no problem, Google is already doing it
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If I can write, who possibly can’t. Even drawing a line in the sand is writing
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The power of the writer is to capture the thoughts live and present them as they appeared in his mind
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Self-censorship is more efficient than any police. You write and say not what you really think, but what you believe is acceptable. By that process we lose those revolutionary ideas that could change society for the better
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Many writers write because they’ve been there, seen that, did it and burnt their fingers
Bangambiki Habyarimana
A writer reports on the universe. When he presents his credentials, the gates of heaven and hell are equally opened to him. He can hear the devil’s defense and god’s accusations. The guards at the king’s heart let him in. The writer can be anything and any one he wants. When he writes he is a god, he creates.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Writing is sharing. You share what you have. Great writers have more to share
Bangambiki Habyarimana