When You Need a Little Creative Inspiration...
To Stay True To Yourself
“Anyhow, the older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I’m far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.” Elizabeth Gilbert
“I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I know that i am not a thing-a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process.” Buckminster Fuller
“It is a fake crown that we wear. My message would be to take off the fake crown. It will cost you more to keep it than to let it go. It is not real. It is just a marker of your programming. You will be happier and freer without it. You will see all of humanity. You will find your true self.” Isabel Wilkerson, quoting an Indian Brahmin in Caste
“Lord grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish” Michelangelo
To Embrace Your Inner Artist
“Art is what makes life more interesting than art.” Robert Filliou
“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make you soul grow, for heaven’s sake.” Kurt Vonnegut
“Heed your life’s calling-that inner urge to give your gifts away” Richard Leider
“Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” Rumi
“If you want a thing — truly want it, want it so badly that you need it as you need air to breathe, then unless you die, you will have it. Why not? It has you. There is no escape. What a cruel and terrible thing escape would be if escape were possible” Octavia Butler
“An artist is an art lover who finds that in all art he sees, something is missing; to put there what he feels is missing becomes the center is his life’s work” Romare Bearden
“What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.” Eugene Delacroix
To Take Action
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did.” Mark Twain
“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.” Buckminster Fuller
“The other side of every fear is freedom.” Marilyn Ferguson
“If you inherently long for something, become it first. If you want gardens, become the gardener. If you want love, embody love. If you want mental stimulation, change the conversation. If you want peace, exude calmness. If you want to fill your world with artists, begin to paint. If you want to be valued, respect your own time. If you want to live ecstatically, find the ecstasy within yourself. This is how to draw it in, day by day, inch by inch.” Victoria Erickson
“I look for what needs to be done. After all, that's how the universe designs itself.” Buckminster Fuller
“I imagine that yes is the only living thing.” e e Cummings
“All of our days are numbered; we cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it. Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the world, a little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about it. If you can hold on to that flame great things can be constructed around it that are massive and powerful and world changing – all held up by the tinniest of ideas.” Nick Cave
To Live Mindfully
“Nothing is ours, except time.” Seneca
“It is only possible to live happily ever after on a day to day basis.” Margaret Bonnano
“Only that day dawns to which we are awake.” Henry David Thoreau
“How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.” Annie Dillard
“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 of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.” Martha Graham
To Remain Open
“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous I don’t know.” Wisława Szymborska
“In the end, I'm not interested in that which I fully understand. The words I have written over the years are just a veneer. There are truths that lie beneath the surface of the words... truths that rise up without warning, like the humps of a sea monster and then disappear. What performance and song is to me is finding a way to tempt the monster to the surface, to create a space, where the creature can break through what is real and what is known to us. This shimmering space, where imagination and reality intersect... this is where all love and tears and joy exist. This is the place. This is where we live.” Nick Cave
“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.” Buckminster Fuller
“The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.” Elizabeth Gilbert
"You can't expect somebody to become a biologist by giving them access to the Harvard University biology library and saying, "Just look through it." That will give them nothing. The internet is the same, except magnified enormously. The person who wins the Nobel Prize in biology is not the person who read the most journal articles and took the most notes on them. It's the person who knew what to look for. Cultivating that capacity to seek what's significant, always willing to question whether you're on the right track, that's what education is going to be about, whether it's using computers and internet, or pencil and paper and books." Noam Chomsky
