SCHOLAR ISLAND

CREATIVITY

"Man never creates; he discovers and uses."

Ernest Holmes

 

"Every creative act is a sudden cessation of stupidity."

Dr. Edwin Land

 

"The heart of creativity is an experience of the mystical union; the heart of the mystical union is an experience of creativity."

-Julia Cameron

 

"Extreme attention is the creative facility."

-Carlos Fuentes

 

"It is better to create than to be learned; creating is the true essence of life."

-Niebuhr

 

"We owe everything to human creativity. Everything that lasts, that changes our lives, that emerges from what was once unimaginable has its roots in the initial spark of innovation."

-Joshua Cooper Ramo

 

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer�.it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in my memory, and....provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself....Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is I cannot tell!!"

Mozart

 

"A single Creator inspired by love is stronger than all the sciences combined, which are deprived of love."

-Anastasia

 

"I write (music) as a sow piddles."

- Mozart

 

"The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth."

Gaston Bachelard

 

"Creative people know from experience that they are 'led' from opportunity to opportunity and that 'good fortune' just seems to happen to them. All parts of the universe are connected and we draw to ourselves exactly what we are in attitude and consciousness."

-Roy Eugene Davis

Time, Space, and Circumstance

 

"When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself."

-Shunryu Suzuki

 

"We owe everything to human creativity. Everything that lasts, that changes our lives, that emerges from what was once unimaginable has its roots in that initial spark of innovation."

-Joshua cooper Ramo

 

"I believe you can choose to approach the world creatively or not creatively. There's always the possibility of turning over any task in an unusual, creative way."

-Tod Machover, composer, director, Opera of the Future   MIT;s Media Lab

 

"As regards the birth of a work of art in a man�s mind, if he is only in a susceptible mood, almost any object that comes within his range of perception will begin to speak to him, in other words, will generate in him some lively, penetrating, original thought. So it is that a trivial event may become the seed of a great and glorious work. Jacob Bohme is said to have been enlightened upon some deep point of natural science by the sudden sight of a tin can."

Schopenhaur

 

"There is always an element of play in creative living. When this playful element disappears, joy goes with it, and so does any sense of being able to innovate."

Donald Winnicott

 

 

"I sit for long nights all by myself and don�t have a thought in my head. I�m dry. I�m blocked, or so it seems. I sit at the piano and just improvise � strum some chords or try a sequence of notes. And then suddenly I find one that hits, that suggests something else. The whole point of composing, you see, is not to find the chord or note you love. It is only when they progress to another chord or note that you have meaning."

Leonard Bernstein

(From Leonard Bernstein at 60 High Fidelity Aug 78 pp-57 by John Ardoin)

 

"The creative type is one who no longer accepts the collective solution to a problem but must fashion his own."

Ernest Becker

 

"Creativity is a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual."

Arthur Koestler

 

"The highest expression of love is creativity."

-Deepak Chopra

 

"An empty stomach is one of the secrets of any creativity."

Mahatma Gandhi

 

"Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected."

William Plomer

 

"Creativity is a different quality of spiritual life than humility and asceticism; it is a revelation of the god-like nature of humanity."

Nikolai Berdyaev

 

"It is important that your vision actually gets you excited when you imagine it-and that you are able to spend time with it. I don't believe that somebody could be creative without spending some time with themselves, pushing ideas through, and imagining on their own."

-Tod Machover

 

"Let's pretend there's a way of getting through it somehow....let's pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through....Why, it's turning into a mist now....it'll be easy to get through..."

-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass 

 

"Solitude is everything."

Rainer Marie Rilke

 

"In the stillness of one�s being is I center of Creation.

There I am I camera, I image."

Louise Nevelson

 

"I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. I think rather the result of a profound indolence and of our incapacity to put to work certain forces in ourselves. These unknown forces work deep within us, with the aid of the elements of daily life, its scenes and passions, and, when they burden us and oblige us to conquer the kind of somnolence in which we indulge ourselves like invalids who try to prolong dream and dread resuming contact with reality, in short when the work that makes itself in us and in spite of us demands to be born, we can believe that this work comes to us from beyond and is offered us by the gods."

Jean Cocteau

 

"One cannot create without a little sluttishness packed away somewhere. Neatness and order are delicious in themselves, but permissible only to the surgeon or the nurse."

Rebecca West

 

 

"The more conscious you become, the more unconscious you realize you are. You don't stop. There is no stopping place. There is an openness that is part of a new style of thinking."

-Patricia Sun

 

"The creative person becomes, then, in art, literature and religion, the mediator of natural terror and the indicator of a new way to triumph over it. He reveals the darkness and the dread of the human condition and fabricates a new symbolic transcendence over it. This has been the function of the creative deviant from the Shamans through Shakespeare."

Ernest Becker

 

"Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all they have suffered to enrich us. We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthmas, epilepsies, and the fear of death, which is worse than all the rest."

-Marcel Proust

 

"The rebel's individuality can never be as total as he would like to think. The modern cant word creativity , with its resonance of a divine power making something out of nothing, is, however flattering, profoundly misleading. Inspiration depends on knowledge and technical competence as much as it does on some private alchemy unique to the creator; he builds at least partly with bricks he has got from others."

-Peter Gay

Freud, Jews and Other Germans

 

"Don't think! Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything of self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things; you simply must do them."

Ray Bradbury

 

"We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create. Lord of all things, he is not lord of himself. he feels lost amid his own abundance. With more means at its disposal, more knowledge, more techniques than ever, it turns out that the world today goes the same way as the worst of worlds that have been: it simply drifts." 

-Jose Ortega Y Gasset

 

"God alone has the power of creative attention, the power really to think into being that which does not exist."

Simone Weil

 

The greatest formal talent is worthless if it does not serve a creativity which is capable of shaping a cosmos."

Einstein

 

"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better."

John Updike

Picked up Pieces

 

"For the production of a work of art is not the result of a miracle. It requires preparation. The soil, be it ever so rich, must be fed. By taking thought, by deliberate effort, the artist must enlarge, deepen and diversify his personality. Then the soil must lie fallow. Like the Bride of Christ, the artist waits for the illumination that shall bring forth a new spiritual life. He goes about this ordinary avocations with patience; the subconscious does it�s mysterious business; and then, suddenly springing, you might think from nowhere, the idea is produced. But like the corn that was sown on stony ground it may easily wither away; it must be tended with anxious care. All the power of the artist�s mind must be set to work on it, all his technical skill, all his experience, and whatever he has in him of character and individuality, so that with infinite pains he may present it with the completeness that is fitting to it."

Somerset Maugham

The Summing Up

 

"Creativity is laced through what all of us scientists do in our day-to-day work because we're confronted with unsolved problems. And the goal is to get sharp, powerful, elegant explanations and solutions to those problems. Typically, that requires insight and a leap of understanding to be able to find pattern."

-Brian Greene, professor of physics at Columbia University

 

 

"For one of the great differences between the amateur and the professional is that the latter has the capacity to progress."

Somerset Maugham

 

    "When we speak of the individual as a source of renewal, we call to mind the magic word creativity-a word of dizzying popularity at the moment. It is more than a word today; it is an incantation. People think of it as a kind of psychic wonder drug, powerful and presumably painless; and everyone wants a prescription.

   It is one of our national vices to corrupt and vulgarize any word or idea that seems to have significance or relevance or freshness. And so we have done with the word creativity. but that should not lead us to neglect the idea behind the word. Granted that much of the current interest in the subject is shallow. Still it is more than a fad. it is part of a growing resistance to the tyranny of the formula, a new respect for individuality, a dawning recognition of the potentialities of the liberated mind.

   We must never forget that though the word may be popular the consequences of true creativity can never be assured of popularity. new ways threaten the old, and those who are wedded to the old may prove highly intolerant. Today Galileo is a popular historical figure, and we feel wise and emancipated as we reflect indignantly on his persecution for supporting Copernicus. But if he were to reappear today and assert something equally at odds with our own deepest beliefs, his popularity would plummet like one of those lead weights dropped from the Tower of Pisa. our affection is generally reserved for innovators long dead. "

-John W. Gardner

Self-Renewal

 

 

 

"Creation must be a prophesy, a vision of the whole, seeking to embrace everything, to reunite all sensory elements in a single creation. Moira, Ilithyea, and Callone � Death, birth and beauty form a triad of Goddesses who preside over all acts of generation whatsoever: physical, spiritual or intellectual."

Robert Graves

 

 

"Whether it is considered from the viewpoint of its effects on society, or as one of the expressions of the human spirit, creativity stands out as an activity to be studied, cherished, cultivated."

Silvano Arieti

Creativity,the magic synthesis

 

"Silently I listen and present my problem and wait for an impression � a possible solution arrives that is acceptable and understandable to me and peace through the calmness of mind results."

Anna H. Allen

 

"Visions are concealed in the subconscious and only come out slowly while the mind is actually at work. Desire and love for art are essential, as well as absolute stillness."

Gela

 

"My boyfriend was moving to Manchester and wanted me to move t, too. It was during the train journey back from Manchester to London, after a weekend looking for a flat, that Harry Potter made his appearance. I have never felt such a huge rush of excitement. I knew immediately that this was going to be such fun to write.....I didn't know then that it was going to be a book for children-I just knew that I had this boy, Harry. During that journey I also discovered Ron, Nearly Headless Nick, Hagrid, and Peeves. But with the idea of my life careenring round my head. I didn't have a pen that worked! And I never went anywhere without my pen and notebook. So, rather than trying to write it, I had to think it. And I think that was a very good thing. I was besieged by a mass of detail and if it it didn't survive that journey it probably wasn't worth remember."

-Joanne Kathleen (J.K.) Rowling

 

"Neither matter nor spirit means anything in itself. It is important only that they meet each other in man."

Johannes Molzahn

 

"We can come in touch with higher power if we succeed to isolate ourselves from the chaotic and worthless about us."

Ivan Mestrovic

 

"To me, there is no dichotomy of spirit and body, no cleavage between yesterday and today. No line separates now and hereafter. Man is a warm and beautiful unit in the smooth flowing stream of time."

Emma Lu Davis

 

"For now, more than ever before, my feeling is insistent that artistic creativity, and indeed the human creative impulse generally originate solely in the constructive harmonizing of this fundamental dualism of all life. The creative personality is one that successfully overcomes this dualism, and the neurotic personality is one that fails to do so. This goes so far in a certain type of artist, which we call the Romantic, that actual production is only possible with the aid of a concrete Muse through whom or for whom the work is produced. The �experience� which arises in this manner is not, like other sorts of experience, an external phenomena set over against creative work but is apart of it and even identical with it, always providing that the Muse � in practice, usually a real woman � is suited to the role or makes no objection to it, as long as the artist can maintain such a relation on the ideological plane without confusing it with real life."

Otto Rank

Life and Creation

 

"�Creation� as applied to human authorship seems to me to be an entirely misleading term. We rearrange elements He has provided. There is not a vestige of real creativity �de nove� in us."

(extract from a letter to Sister Penelope C.S.M.V. Feb 20. 1943)

C.S. Lewis

 

"The psychology of the creative is really feminine psychology, a fact which proves that creative work grows out of the unconscious depths, indeed out of the region of the mothers."

C.G.Jung

Times Literary Supplement

London, Aug 6, 1954

 

"No productiveness of the highest kind, no remarkable discovery, no great thought that bears fruit and has results, is in the power of anyone� such things are above earthly control. Man must consider them as an unexpected gift from above, as pure children of God which he must receive and venerate with joyful thanks. They are akin to the demon, which does with him what if pleases, and to which he unconsciously resigns himself while he believes he is acting from his own impulse. IN such cases, man may often be considered fan instrument in a higher government of the world � a vessel worthy to contain a divine influence. I say this when I consider how often a single thought has given a different form to whole centuries, and how individual men have imprinted a stamp upon their age which has remained uneffaced and operated beneficially for generations.

However, there is a productiveness of another kind: one subject to earthly influences, one that man has more in his power � although here also he finds cause to bow before something divine. In this category I place all that appertains to the execution of a plan, all the links of a chain of thought, the ends of which already shine forth; I also place there all that constitutes the visible body of a work of art."

Goethe

 

"There is vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into Action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares to the 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 open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.

Keep the channel open

No Artist is pleased

There is no satisfaction whatever at anytime. There is only a Queer, Divine Dissatisfaction. The Blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."

(a letter from Martha Graham to Agnes Demille)

 

"Provided one has the slightest remnant of superstition left, one can hardly reject completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation, or mouthpiece, or medium of some almighty power.....One hears-one does not seek; one takes-one does not ask who gives: a thought flashes out like lightning, inevitably without hesitation-I have never had any choice about it. There is an ecstasy whose terrific tension is sometimes released by a flood of tears, during which one's progress varies from involuntary impetuosity to involuntary slowness. There is a feeling that one is utterly out of hand, with the most distinct consciousness of an infinitude of shuddering thrills that pass through one from head to foot....There is an instinct for rhythmic relations which embraces an entire world of forms....Everything occurs quite without volition, as if in an eruption of freedom, independence, power, and divinity. The spontaneity of the images and similes is most remarkable; one loses all perception of what is imagery and simile....This is my experience of inspiration. I have no doubt that I should have to go back millenniums to find another who could say to me: "This is mine also!"

Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spake Zarathustra

 

"After initially explaining why he is now ready to discuss these things so dear to him, he promises to reveal his "intellectual, psychic, and spiritual processes when composing." He goes on to unequivocally state that the source of his finest musical ideas-like those of his idol Beethoven- is God. He quotes John 14:10, a biblical passage that becomes a sort of cantus fimus as the conversation unfolds and is clearly one of the bedrocks not only of his belief but of his personal experience: "Not I, the Father that dwelleth within me, He doeth the works." Says Brahms, "Jesus proclaimed a great truth when he said that, and when I am at my best while composing, I too feel a higher power is working through me."

Abell then asks Brahms, "How do you contact Omnipotence?" Brahms answers: "That is the great question. It cannot be done merely by will power working through the conscious mind. �.It can only be accomplished by the soul-powers within-the real ego that survives bodily death. Those powers are quiescent to the conscious mind unless illumined by the Spirit. Now Jesus taught that God is Spirit, and He also said, �I and my Father are one.� (John 10;30)

"To realize that we are one with the Creator, as Beethoven did, is a wonderful and awe-inspiring experience. Very few human beings ever come into that realization and that is why there are so few great composers or creative geniuses in any line of human endeavor. I always contemplate all this before commencing to compose. This is the first step. When I feel the urge I begin by appealing directly to my Maker and I first ask him the three most important questions pertaining to our life here in this world-whence, wherefore, whither?

"I immediately feel vibrations that thrill my whole being," Brahms continues. "These are the Spirit illuminating the soul-power within, and in that exalted state, I see clearly what is obscure in my ordinary moods; then I feel capable of drawing inspiration from above. These vibrations assume the forms of distinct mental images, after I have formulated my desire and resolve in regard to what I want-namely, to be inspired so that I can compose something that will uplift and benefit humanity-something of permanent value."

What may surprise many composers and non-composers is the fullness with which Brahms claims these musical ideas come to him."- Straight-away," he says, "the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind�s eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies and orchestration. Measure by measure, the finished product is revealed to me when I am in those rare , inspired moods".

Brahms stresses his own passivity and receptivity in this initial revelatory process. Inspiration is something the artist must await, and while it is possible to facilitate it-as Brahms does by reading passages of poetry or the Bible and reflecting about others who were visited by the muse-it is not under the artists

�s control. He tells Abell,"I have to be in a semi-trance condition to get such results-a condition when the conscious mind is in temporary abeyance and the subconscious is in control, for it is through the subconscious mind which is a part of Omnipotence that the inspiration comes." Brahms argues that "all true inspiration emanates from God, and He can reveal Himself to us only through that spark of divinity within-through what the modern psychologists call the subconscious." Joachim challenges him, saying this term is "inappropriate," and Brahms agrees: "Super-conscious would be a much better term."

Although the conscious mind (which Brahms understood to be the product of the brain and its physical evolution and therefore perishable at death, unlike the "soul-power") cannot control the inner working of creativity, Brahms did seek to stimulate his subconscious-or "super conscious"-to open its gates. During the interview, he took out a drawing depicting the Italian composer Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770) asleep in bed being played to in a dream by the devil-the supposed source of Tartini�s Devil�s Trill Sonata. "When preparing myself for entering that dreamlike state," he recounts, "I often look at this picture of the Devil playing to Tartini, because it is a wonderful illustration of the rare potency of the law of suggestion. Tartini had the right idea, but he invoked a satanic instead of celestial muse.

�.He had been reading the Faust legend, just before going to bed, and he saw in his dream the Devil instead of the Archangel Gabriel or some other heavenly messenger as he might have done if he had been reading Milton instead of Faust.

"The principle is the same, however, and we see in Tartini�s dream a wonderful illustration of the great law of suggestion working. His subconscious mind had been stimulated to a remarkable degree by reading the account of how Faust had sold his soul to Satan, as the price for his rejuvenation. Tartini himself declared that what he had been able to put down on paper was but a feeble echo of what he had heard in his dream-that the most beautiful parts had faded away on awakening. I learned a valuable lesson from Tartini, and that is never completely to lose consciousness when in that semi-trance state, otherwise the ideas escape."

Brahms found that when musical ideas came while he was in that trancelike state, they would rain down upon him in flashes that lasted only an instant but were remarkably complete. He explains that they had to be captured as quickly as possible: "The ideas which I was consciously seeking flowed in upon me with such force and speed, that I could only grasp and hold a few of them; I never was able to jot them all down; they came in instantaneous flashes and quickly faded away again, unless I fixed them on paper�.it is of the utmost importance to put the ideas down on paper immediately. Then they are fixed and cannot escape; and when I look at them again, they conjure up the same inspired mood that gave them birth."

Asked if he thinks that the power Jesus called "The Father within" is in all of us, and that anyone who can enter this dreamlike state can create immortal works, Brahms replies, "Jesus himself answers the same question," The composer cites 14:10 again, and then the 12^th verse of the same chapter: "He that believeth in Me, the works that I do shall he do also, and greater works than these shall he do."

He goes on to explain, "The powers from which all the truly great composers like Mozart, Schubert, Bach and Beethoven drew their inspirations is the same power than enabled Jesus to work his miracles. We call it God, Omnipotence, Divinity, the Creator, etc. Schubert called it �die allmacht,�but �what�s in a name? As Shakespeare so aptly questions.

"Jesus Himself is very explicit about this, in saying �Ask and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you� There would not be so much good music paper wasted in fruitless attempts to compose if those great precepts were better understood."

Brahms clearly distinguishes between music composed under divine inspiration and that which is not: "I know several young composers who are atheists. I have read their scores, and I assure you�.that they are doomed to speedy oblivion, because they are utterly lacking in inspiration. Their works are purely cerebral. The great Nazarene knew that law also, and He proclaimed in John 15:4, "The branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine."

Despite his emphasis on inspiration, however, Brahms is careful to emphasize that this is not enough. Solid musical structure is an essential scaffolding for inspired ideas. He remarks to Joachim "I wish to impress upon him (ABELL) the great truth that my compositions are not the fruits of inspiration alone, but of severe, laborious and painstaking toil; I want the readers of his book, in the years to come to develop this divinity within was central to Brahms� composing process. He tells Abell, "The themes that will endure in my compositions all come to me in this way. It has always been such a wonderful experience that I never could induce myself to talk about it-even to you, Joseph (Joachim). I felt that I was, for a moment, in tune with the Infinite, and there is no thrill like it."���.

Tom Pniewski (director of cultural affairs at the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York) The WORLD & I April 1997

 

"The opposite of destruction is "construction," often aligned with "creative" a word overused, misused, and maligned. "Creativity" often has the odor of Hollywood or Madison Avenue surround it. One may rightfully be suspicious of the word. We do not create out of thin air. I have even been tempted to exaggerate and say there is no such thing as creativity. Instead, the creative person selects what already exists and then arranged the notes or sculpts the marble "cooperatively" with the surrounding materials on earth or with the forces of the universe all about us. The "geniuses" are those who select well and then rearrange in order to satisfy their vision, which, in the case of Beethoven or Michelangelo, becomes our vision and our art."

-Joseph Eger

Einstein's Violin

 

  "A tendency to play around with ideas, to play "let's pretend," to imagine outcomes, isn't important only to children. Are you the kind of worker, communicator, decision-maker, designer, artist, business person, or engineer who builds a detailed plan for each creation, then follows it step-by-step? Or do you just start pottering around with ideas or materials until some kind of order begins to emerge? If you are the latter kind of worker, you've probably suffered the jibes and innuendos of your more analytically minded colleagues, and if you are any good at "thinking by the seat of your pants," you also know that you are capable of putting together concoctions on the fly that the careful preplaners will probably never achieve in years of deliberate effort. Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, writing about the way "Primitive" cultures approach theory-building in their empirical way "primitive" cultures approach theory-building in their empirical disciplines used the term bricolage as a mode for the way all humans "primitive" or "civilized" , build scientific theories by pottering around with natural objects in various combinations. A bricoleur, in this sense, is a kind of intuitive technical, who plays with concepts and objects in order to learn about them.

   Bricolage brings the development of first-person educational media full circle. The word was picked up by the computer scientist and educational expert Seymour Papert. In his book Mindstorms, Papert point out how the term can extend to an entire way of thinking:

The process reminds one of tinkering: learning consists of building up a set of materials and tools that one can handle and manipulate. Perhaps most central of all, it is a process of working with what you've got. We're all familiar with this process on the conscious level, for example, when we attack a problem empirically, trying out all the things that we have ever known to have worked on similar problems before. But here I suggest that working with what you've got is a shorthand for deeper, even unconscious learning processes.....here I am suggesting that in the most fundamental sense, we as learners, are all bricoleurs.

The same statement could be made today about cyberspace...."

-Howard Rheingold

Virtual Reality

 

 

   "It is only too painfully obvious, moreover, that neither the scientist nor the artist is ever a "creator." The word "creative," so incessantly misused by our younger critical schools, is a fiction of that optimism about human achievement which-it has been said-thrives most vigorously in Lunatic asylums. Nature, as Goethe puts it, runs it course by such eternal and necessary principles that even the gods themselves cannot alter them. The most that the scientist and the artist accomplish is new understanding of things that have always been. They "create' a clearer perception. They are both, in this sense, observers, the obvious difference being that the scientist impersonally describes the external world, whereas the artist expresses the effects which external things exert upon his own mind and heart. In both cases, the more generally applicable the observations, the greater is the science or art."

Hans Zinsser

Rats, Lice and History

 

"....I instinctively commenced to make excursions beyond the limits of the small world of which I had knowledge, and I saw new scenes. These were at first very blurred and indistinct, and would flit away when I tried to concentrate my attention upon them. They gained in strength and distinctiveness and finally assumed the concreteness of real things. I soon discovered that my best comfort was attained if I simply went on in my vision further and further, getting new impressions all the time, and so I began to travel; of course, in my mind. Every night (and sometimes during the day), when alone. I would start on my journeys-see new places, cities and countries; live there, meet people and make friendships and acquaintances and however, unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life, and not a bit les intense in their manifestations. This I did constantly until I was about seventeen, when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas., which is radically opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient."

-Nikola Tesla

 

".....creative individuals are more at home with complexity and apparent disorder than other people are....The creative individual in his generalized preference for apparent disorder, turns to the dimly realized life of the unconscious, and is likely to have more than the usual amount of respect for the forces of the irrational in himself and in others.....the creative individuals not only respects the irrational in himself, but courts it as the most promising source of novelty in his own thought. he rejects the demand of society that he should shun in himself the primitive, the uncultured, the naive, the magical, the nonsensical; that he must be a "civilized" member of the community. When an individual thinks in ways which are customarily tabooed, his fellows may regard him as mentally unbalanced. In my view this kind of imbalance is more likely to be healthy than unhealthy. The truly creative individual stands ready to abandon old classifications and to acknowledge that life, particularly his own unique life, is rich with new possibilities. To him, disorder offers the potentiality of order."

-Ilya Prigogine  (1977 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry

 

Consequently: he who wants to have right without wrong,

Order without disorder,

Does not understand the principles

Of heaven and earth,

he does not know how

Things hang together."

-Chuang Tzu

 

************

Book: "The Artful Universe: The Cosmic Source of Human Creativity" by John D. Barrow

Book: "Creation: Artists, Gods, and Origins" by Peter Conrad

Book: "The Nine Muses: A Mythological Path to Creativity" by Angeles Arrien

Book: "Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney" by Paul Johnson

Book: "Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry" by Jacques Maritain (out of print)

Book: "Walking In This World: The Practical Art of Creativity" by Julia Cameron

Book: "The Courage to Create" by Rollo May

Book: "Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds" by Harold Bloom

Book: "The Act of Creation" by Arthur Koestler

Book: "origins: The Creative Spark Behind Japan's Best Product Designs" by Shu Hagiwara Kodansha

Book: "The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use It for Life, A Practical Guide" by Twyla Tharp with Mark Reiter

Book: "Creativity In Invention And Design: Computational and Cognitive Explorations of Technological Originality" by Subrata Dasgutpa

Book: "Dimensions of Creativity" Ed. by Margaret A. Boden

Book: "Computers as Theatre" by Brenda Laurel

Book: "The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry into the Origins of Science and Religion" by John E. Pfeiffer

 

 

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