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.
He who does not really feel himself lost, is lost without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.
José Ortega y Gasset
We should not for a moment consider even our best-established knowledge of existence as true.
It is awareness only of the colors that our own vision paints on the film of one bubble in one strand of foam on the ocean of being.
Olaf Stapledon
Everything is always falling out of balance against a background of perfect harmony.
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
“I am your own way of looking at things,” she said. “When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.”
William Stafford, from “When I Met My Muse”
My plan, then, in so far as the negation of all effort and purpose may be said to be a plan, is to stop evolving, to remain what I am and to become more and more only what I am — that is, to become more miraculous.
Henry Miller
David Bayles & Ted Orland
Your hand needs time to wander enough to be able to find something you weren’t aware of, like an expedition partner who can see things you can’t. The hand is experiencing the same world in a different way. It’s you but it’s not you.
Lynda Barry
We exist as phantom, monster, miracle, each a theme park all one’s own, and mainly unknowable in the end, not just to others, but to ourselves as well.
Diane Ackerman
To acknowledge and cross a new threshold is always a challenge. It demands courage and also a sense of trust in whatever is emerging.
John O’Donohue
Centering is a verb. It is an ongoing process . . . Centering is not a model, but a way of balancing, a spiritual resource in times of conflict, an imagination. It seems in certain lights to be an alchemical vessel, a retort, which bears an integration of purposes, an integration of levels of consciousness. It can be called to, like a divine ear.
Centering . . . is the discipline of bringing in (i.e., of sympathy or empathy) rather than of leaving out. Of saying “Yes, Yes” to what we behold. To what is holy and to what is unbearable. But my experience tells me now that there is an important crucial stage of saying Yes to a No. For resistance also must be embraced. Not only accepting resistance but practicing it.
MC Richards
Click to Listen!
seeker of truth
follow no path
all paths lead where
truth is here
e e cummings
Prospective Immigrants Please Note
Either you will go
through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your positions
to die bravely
But much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
The door itself makes no promises
It is only a door.
Adrienne Rich
More and more I’ve become convinced that the great treasure to possess is the unknown.
P. L. Travers
Stories move in circles. They don’t go in straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles. There are stories inside stories and stories between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. And part of the finding is getting lost. And when you’re lost, you start to listen.
Deena Metzger
Who is doing the work? In process painting, which is a tool for self-exploration, which is a type of meditation, who is doing the work? Is it you, as a conscious entity, or is it the unconscious itself, the creative source that is doing the work?
Stewart Cubley
When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taut with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.
D. H. Lawrence