Creativity and Inspiration

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

Imagination! who can sing thy force?

The difference between the almost -right word& the right word is really a large matter—it’sthe difference between the lightning-bug & thelightning.

I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did His dictation.

In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, PLUS the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come:

Wit invents ; inspiration reveals .

For what links us are elemental experiences—emotions—forces that have no intrinsic language and must be imagined as art if they are to be contemplated at all.

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them.

There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.

Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

Genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, and continually seek for material and continually form itself around it.Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a ‘miracle.

What is Genius?- To aspire to a lofty aim and to will the means to that aim.

Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.

A thought comes when it will, not when I will.

Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.

The wreckage of stars - I built a world from this wreckage.

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors - walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful.

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.