Creativity and Inspiration

The discovery of truth by slow, progressive meditation is talent. Intuition of the truth, not preceded by perceptible meditation, is genius.

Talent is that which is in a man’s power; genius is that in whose power a man is.

Talent is a docile creature. It bows its head meekly while the world slips the collar over it. . . . But genius is always impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes it hard to train.

Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.

A true talent delights the possessor first.

Ideas are a capital that bears interest only in the hands of talent.

Talented people almost always know full well the excellence that is in them.

Talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it.

In the battle of existence, Talent is the punch; Tact is the clever footwork.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Artists are the antennae of the race.

The serious artist . . . is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He’s obsessed by his material; it’s like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work . . . as the soldier flings himself into the enemy’s trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner . . . he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.

For me, a poet is someone who is “in contact.” Someone through whom a current is passing.

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job.

An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions.

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.

The Possible’s slow fuse is lit By the Imagination.

An idea is a light turned on in a man’s soul.

The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Wealth is not a matter of intelligence it’s a matter of inspiration.

Genius is eternal patience.