Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
~ Howard Thurman
Creativity
A second time
in Boldness, Change, Imagination, Creativity, Vision, Exploration
Never travel to any road a second time.
~ Ibn Batthtah
Freedom and constraints
in Vision, Creativity, Limitations
My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit.
~ Igor Stravinsky
The creator's function
The creator's function is to sift the elements he receives from [imagination], for human activity must impose limits on itself. The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free.
~ Igor Stravinsky
Be daring, be different, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers…
~ Cecil Beaton
in Beauty, Creativity
There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
~ Ansel Adams
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.
~ Dr. Seuss
The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a room packed with archaic furniture. You must get the old furniture of what you know, think, and believe out before anything new can get in. Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it.
~ Dee Hock
in Action, Creativity, Initiative, Innovation, Vision, Work
I have recently decided that the constructive work of the world is done by an appallingly small percentage of the population. The rest simply don’t give a damn, or they grow tired, or they fail to acquire when young the ideas that would vitalize them for the long decades.
I am not saying that such people don’t matter; they are among the most precious items on the earth. But they cannot be depended upon to either generate necessary new ideas or to put them into operation if someone else generates them.
Therefore, those men and women who do have the energy to form new constructs and new ways to implement them must do the work of many. I believe it to be an honorable aspiration to want to be among the creators.
~ James Michener