The following quotes are excerpted from Micha Yongo’s What Makes a Creative Personality? in his Blog: Thoughthouse. We serve you these quotes as introduction to some of our forthcoming posts about the creative personality. Though Micah Yongo listed 15 quotes, naijaGRAPHITTI is publishing only 14.
‘The saving of our
world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the
conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming
minority.’― Martin Luther King Jr.
(Nobel Prize winning humanitarian and civil rights leader)
‘It is in this gesture
of going beyond to be in oneself rather than the pawn of a consensus, the refusal
to stay within a rigid circle that others have drawn around one – it is in this
solitary act that one finds true creativity. All others things follow as a
matter of course.’ ― Alexander
Grothendieck (French mathematician)
‘Creativity is just
connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they
feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.
It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to
connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they
were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought
more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare
a commodity.’ ― Steve Jobs (Co-founder
of Apple)
‘To gain your own voice
one has to forget about having it heard.’ ― Allen Ginsberg (American poet & writer)
‘Creativity takes
courage.’ ― Henri Matisse (French
artist)
‘Often the difference
between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or
ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated
risk – and to act.’ ― Andre Malraux
(French novelist and art theorist)
‘Artists are driven not
by success but by the need to take something [from] inside – whether its
hearing something no one else hears, seeing something that no one sees,
envisioning a play or whatever – there are a class of people who are wired for
creation. They’re just different than everybody else’s mindset who are wired
for execution or whatever else. And because they are driven by this passion for
creation, that passion will get them through. Not because they’re resilient for
the sake of resilience, they’re resilient because they’ve got a bigger vision
than just that moment in time.’ ― Steve
Blank (serial entrepreneur)
‘The one thing you have
that nobody else has, is you – your voice, your mind, your story, your vision.
So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The
moment that you feel that just possibly you’re walking down the street naked,
exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside and
showing too much of yourself, that’s the moment you may be starting to get it
right.’ – Neil Gaiman (British short
fiction author)
‘There is a vitality, a
life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action,
and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be
lost.’ ― Martha Graham (American
dancer and choreographer)
‘The truly creative
mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally,
inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a
misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a
god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the
overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating
of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very
breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some
strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.’
― Pearl S. Buck (American writer
& novelist)
‘Go into yourself. Find
out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots
into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have
to die if you were forbidden to write… ask yourself in the most silent hour of
your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this
answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong,
simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your
whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a
sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one
had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose… your
personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place
where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by,
far in the distance. And if out of this turning within, out of this immersion
in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether
they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works:
for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a
voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is
the only way one can judge it.’ ― Rainer
Maria Rilke (Austrian poet & novelist)
‘But unless we are
creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists,
whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint or clay or
words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn
our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of
important career.’ ― Madeleine L’Engle
(American writer)
‘Productiveness is your
acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to
live–that productive work is the process by which man’s consciousness controls
his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to
fit one’s purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the
earth in the image of one’s values–that all work is creative work if done by a
thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in
uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others–that your work is yours
to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible
to you and nothing less is human–that to cheat your way into a job bigger than
your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and
borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your
mind’s full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind
of motion: decay–that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to
lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live–that your body
is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your
mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road–that the man who
has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to
crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled
machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his
course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another
man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up–that your work is the
purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right
to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty
or love, can be only travellers you choose to share your journey and must be travellers
going on their own power in the same direction.’ ― Ayn Rand (Russian-American novelist, playwright, philosopher &
screenwriter)
‘If
there is one word that makes creative people different from others, it is the
word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude.’ ― Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
(Psychologist and creativity researcher)
No comments :
Post a Comment