While the ancient world valued the individual not as an individual but as a representative of something universal, e.g. a virtue, the rebirth of antiquity saw in the individual as an individual a unique expression of the universe, incomparable, irreplaceable, and of infinite significance.
- Paul Tillich (2000, p.19)
The begetter of a poem or a novel is more like a midwife than a mother: the aim is to get the child into the world with as little damage as possible - and if the creature is alive it will scream to be liberated from the navel strings and feeding tubes of the ego.
- Amis (2017, Loc 5516)
Since we’re a part of the natural world we are also, continuously changing… we might change in an instant, shift from one state or condition to another. It’s not always apparent why. But there’s always an inner motivation, a hidden bridge that ties one experience to another.
- Zaporah (1995, p.25)
Empathy is the imagination of the soul, the projection outside oneself by feeling (obviously in imagination only) what the other person is feeling. It is not the source of all goodness, but the premise for all art, the sine qua non of Greek theatre, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller. Without the imaginary leap necessary to adopt somebody else’s position, all drama would be mere parcels of words.
Masters (1996, p.186)
Another way to look at creativity is to say that it’s not about being creative, but simply about being. “Being creative” implies being other than who you are, when actually creativity is being more of who you are. Don’t build with more action, build with more attention. Then, you’ll be “creative.”
- Zaporah (1995, p.41)
Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre.
Johnstone, Impro p.88.
Well-being means to be fully born, to become what one potentially is; it means to have the full capacity for joy and for sadness or, to put it still differently, to awake from the half-slumber the average man lives in, and to be fully awake. If it is all that, it means also to be creative; that is, to react and respond to myself, to others, to everything that exists - to react and to respond as the real, total man I am to the reality of everybody and everything as he or it is. In this act of true response lies the area of creativity.
- Fromm (1960, p.36)
We discover that each present moment holds everything we need to meet the next. In this flow of changing phenomena, we see that all the old moments have aided our delivery to this one, one moment falling out of another.
- Zaporah (1995, p.7)
We are supposed to create under inspiration; only our subconscious gives us inspiration… In the soul of a human being there are certain elements which are subject to consciousness and will. When the subconscious, when intuition, enters into our work we must know how not to interfere.
- Stanislavksy (1962, p.13)
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.
- Buber (1937 p.29)
In the spontaneous realization of the self man unites himself anew with the world - with man, nature and himself.
- Fromm, (1991, p.225)
To the degree to which I can rid myself of this filter and can experience myself as the universal man, that is, to the degree to which repressedness diminishes. I am in touch with the deepest sources within myself, and that means with all of humanity.
- Fromm (1960, p. 89)
The power of the imagination to make things look more intensely real, is a quality of illusion in reality that is at the same time a growth in reality.
- Frye (1976, p.285)
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.
- Einstein (1929, p.97)
The fact that the imagination seizes on the changing aspect of reality means that it lives in a continuous present. This means not only that “the imperfect is our paradise” (CP, 194), but that the imagination is always beginning.
- Frye (1976, p.284)
This openness, this yes-ness: the surrender to what is… Each of us is a window of awareness, the emptiness in which the truth is revealed. We live in and as the mystery. We are the embrace.
- Frederickson (2017, Loc 2081)
If the individual realizes his self by spontaneous activity and thus relates himself to the world, he ceases to be an isolated atom; he and the world become part of one structuralized whole; he has his rightful place, and thereby his doubt concerning himself and the meaning of life disappears. This doubt sprang from his separateness and from the thwarting of life; when he can live, neither compulsively nor automatically but spontaneously, the doubt disappears. He is aware of himself as an active and creative individual and recognizes that there is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
- Fromm (1991, p.226)