Creativity quotes, with sources

I dwell in Possibility— A fairer house than Prose— More numerous of windows— Superior of doors—

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

Without music life would be a mistake.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.

Exuberance is Beauty.

Every artist was first an amateur.

I want to create my own sun for myself.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.

Art is a step from nature toward the Infinite.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.

What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.

I have no more made my book than my book has made me.

The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

The first and last thing that is required of genius is love of truth.

Great minds are like eagles, and build their nest in some lofty solitude.

An empty book is like an infant’s soul, in which anything may be written.

Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.

In every artist there is a germ of daring, without which no talent is conceivable.

One must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.

To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.

Through the disintegration of the old, re-creation becomes possible.

Would that we loved the ancients more and copied them less!

Branches are roots in the air.

You are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.

Beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.