Quotes about Creativity

Imitation cannot go above its model.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

All writing comes by the grace of God.

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

Congratulate yourself if you have broken the monotony of a conventional age

If a man is at once acquainted with the geometric foundation of things and with their festal splendor, his poetry is exact and his arithmetic musical.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm...Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Genius is religious.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.

Better that the book should be not quite so good, and the writer better, and not himself a ridiculous contrast to all he has written.

So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs,—a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom of time: a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came), which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men. These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul.