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Creativity Quotes & Poetry

For more than forty years, we’ve been collecting quotes and poetry that support the practice of process art. We’re happy to have this space to share some of our favorites with you.

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Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.

Louise Erdrich

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

David Foster Wallace

If you want to surrender to creativity, surrender to creation.

Judith Orloff

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.

Alan Alda

You simply cannot learn and know at the same time, and this is a frustration all artists must bear.

Mary Ruefle

Observe the wonders as they occur around you.
Don’t claim them. Feel the artistry
Moving through.
And be silent.

Rumi

Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the ploughshare of self examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self.

Albert Camus

Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always
known in thought . . .
Say not, “ I have found the truth,” but rather,
“I have found a truth.”
Say not, “I have found the path of the soul.”
Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my path.”
For the soul walks upon all paths.

Kahlil Gibran

The imagination retains a passion for freedom. There are no rules for the imagination. It never wants to stay trapped in the expected territories. The old maps never satisfy it. It wants to press ahead beyond the accepted frontiers and bring back reports of regions no mapmaker has yet visited.

John O’Donohue

Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.

Pema Chodron

Art is what we call . . . the thing an artist does. It’s not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the . . . eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist.

Seth Godiin

But just when the worst bears down you find a pretty bubble in your soup at noon, and outside at work a bird says, “Hi!” Slowly the sun creeps along the floor; it is coming your way. It touches your shoe.

William Stafford

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Maybe happiness is this: not feeling like you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else. – Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov

Radical vulnerability. What’s that? It’s following your work into its darkest corners and strangest manifestations, revealing things about yourself that you don’t want to reveal until your work requires you to do this, and never failing in only mediocre or generic ways. We all contradict ourselves. We contain multitudes.

Jerry Saltz

Woman in blue working on a process painting with blue and pink colors
The Real Work
 
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
 
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
 
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
 
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry

People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.

Alain de Botton

There may be intention but it’s easily abandoned when what started as a ladder becomes a torch or what started as a swimming pool becomes a camp fire and what started out as a lifeguard becomes a caveman.

Lynda Barry

Not I, not anyone else, can travel that road
for you,
You must travel it for yourself.
It is not far, it is within reach,
perhaps you have been on it since you were
born and did not know.

Walt Whitman

Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it.

Rumi

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