31 quotes
Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society.
The Courage to Create (1975)
Dogmatists of all kinds — scientific, economic, moral, as well as political — are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so.
The Courage to Create (1975)
Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.
The Courage to Create (1975)
A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.
The Courage to Create (1975)
The human imagination leaps to form the whole, to complete the scene in order to make sense of it.
The Courage to Create (1975)
What occurs is always a process, a doing — specifically a process interrelating the person and his or her world.
The Courage to Create (1975)
Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values.
The Courage to Create (1975)
Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.
The Courage to Create (1975)
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
The Courage to Create (1975)
The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary.
The Courage to Create (1975)
It is a road to universals beyond discrete personal experience.
The Courage to Create (1975)
You can live without a father who accepts you, but you cannot live without a world that makes some sense to you.
The Courage to Create (1975)
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.
The Courage to Create (1975)
People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.
The Courage to Create (1975)
Reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged.
The Courage to Create (1975)
In this sense genuine artists are so bound up with their age that they cannot communicate separated from it. In this sense, too, the historical situation conditions the creativity.
The Courage to Create (1975)
The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.
The Courage to Create (1975)
When you write a poem, you discover that the very necessity of fitting your meaning into such and such a form requires you to search in your imagination for new meanings.
The Courage to Create (1975)
The self is made up, on its growing edge, of the models, forms, metaphors, myths, and all other kinds of psychic content which give it direction in its self-creation. This is a process that goes on continuously.
The Courage to Create (1975)
It is highly significant, and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in identification through one's own sensitivity with the suffering of one's fellow human beings.
The Courage to Create (1975)