"Creative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... offices and dignities. But his greatness was in force of character rather than original ideas,—like that of Washington, or William III., or the Duke of Wellington. He had not the comprehensive intellect of Charlemagne, nor the creative genius of Peter of Russia, but he had the sagacity of Richelieu and the iron will of Napoleon. He was statesman as well as priest,—marvellous for his activity, insight into human nature, vast executive abilities, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... early eighteenth century, the insistence on spiritual courage as the necessary opposite to brutal force and mere materialism. He connected that high ambition, that craving for la gloire, with all pure and elevated things, with the art and literature, with the intelligence and beauty of the French creative mind. He recommended, in that gray hour of European dulness, a fresh ornament to life, a scarlet feather, a panache, as our French friends say. And the gay note that he blew from his battered clarion was still sounding last year ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... wroth that his gift should be scorned of man. The face of the warm bright world is the face of a flower, The word of the wind and the leaves that the light winds fan As the word that quickened at first into flame, and ran, Creative and subtle and fierce with invasive power, Through darkness and cloud, from the breath of the one ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... vista before me, the months of laborious drudging toil and pain, the long agony of effort necessary to write any book, even a poor one, was beginning to appear less weary, less futile; there was the first faint glow of the joy of creative effort. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... his head firmly. "Not at all. He did new, creative work in every one of the fields he touched. He was considered something of a mystic, but not a ...
— Suite Mentale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of Poesy, composed in 1581, but not printed till 1595, was written in manlier English than the Arcadia, and is one of the very few books of criticism belonging to a creative and uncritical time. He was also the author of a series of love sonnets, Astrophel and Stella, in which he paid Platonic court to the Lady Penelope Rich (with whom he was not at all in love), according to the conventional usage ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... itself to every mood, to all keys; now brief, forcible, sharp as steel, now in majestic breadth, the words poured in among the people like a mighty stream. A figurative expression, a striking simile, made the most difficult thoughts intelligible. His was a wonderfully creative power. He used language with sovereign ease. As soon as he touched a pen his mind worked with the greatest freedom; his sentences show the cheerful warmth which filled him, the perfect charm of sympathetic creation is poured out upon them. ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... efficient, depends upon tradition. To say so sounds a truism, because we rarely realise all that tradition implies: on the side of the artist, what to do, and on the side of his public, how to feel: a habit, an expectation which accumulates the results of individual creative genius and individual appreciative sensibility, giving to each its greatest efficacy. When one remembers, in individual instances—Kant, Darwin, Michel Angelo, Mozart—how very little which is absolutely new, how slight a variation, how inevitable a combination, marks, after all, the ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... I knew, thank God! when the rocking, crooning sea took my heart as a harp in its hands, that all the sins and errors of earth were of creative intention and most beautiful, as are all the works of the God of us all. Nay, but, thinks I, the sins of life are more lovely than the righteous accomplishments. Removed by the starlit sky, wherein He dwells—removed because of its tender distance ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... can't explain these dislikes. Your uncle reasons well and has a clear logical mind, but he has neither creative nor ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... PER-T EM HRU which it contains prove the princess's devotion to the cult of Osiris, and the Hymns to Amen-Ra show that she was able to regard this god and Osiris not as rivals but as two aspects of the same god. She believed that the "hidden" creative power which was materialized in Amen was only another form of the power of procreation, renewed birth and resurrection which was typified by Osiris. The oldest copies of the PER-T EM HRU which we have on papyrus contain a few extracts from other ancient funerary works, such as the "Book ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... between a man's mind and a woman's that there is between that of a man of genius and a man of talent. Genius grasps the idea, and works from it outward; talent moulds the form in which the already created idea may be embodied. Genius is creative, comprehensive, intuitive, all-seeing; talent is acute, one-sided, cumulative, inductive. The men of genius will ever be found to be gifted with this womanly quality of mind—the power of seizing truth, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... think we are fairly entitled to affirm, that Le Sage was not considered by his contemporaries as a man of original and creative genius; although he possessed, in an eminent degree, the power of appropriating and embellishing the works of others, that his style was graceful, his allusions happy, and his wit keen and spontaneous. If any one assert that this is to underrate Le Sage, and that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... faculty when he designed Comedy and Tragedy contending for Garrick, than when he merely took a likeness of that actor. The same difference exists in writings between the original conceptions of Shakspeare and some other creative geniuses, and such full-length likenesses of individual persons, 'The Talking Gentleman' for instance, as are admirably drawn by Miss Mitford. Jane Austen's powers, whatever may be the degree in which she possessed them, were certainly of that higher order. She ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... leaves on every tree, the rivers winding to the sea, The swinging tides, the wheeling winds, the rolling heavens above, Around the May-pole Igdrasil, they worked the Morrice-master's will, Persuaded into measure by the all-creative Love. ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... and bayaderes. The Vedas abound in references, either direct or indirect, to phallic worship. Indeed, according to some authorities, the Hindu Brahma is the same as the Greek Pan,[P] "who is the creative spirit of the ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... it is practicable to select a few games that contain all of the typical elements of interest. Such limitation seems no more possible than in painting, poetry, music, or any other field of spontaneous imitative or creative expression. There will doubtless always be some games that will have large popular following, playing on the "psychology of the crowd," as well as on that of the players. Thus we have the spectacle of so-called national games, Baseball and Football in America, Handball ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... should die continually. No sooner here on earth does it awake to its peculiar being, than it struggles to behold and comprehend the Spirit of Life. In the first dim twilight of its existence, it beholds this spirit, is pervaded by its energies,—is quick and creative likethe spirit itself, and yet slumbers away into death after having seen it. But the image it has seen, remains, in the eternal procreation, as a homogeneal existence, is again renewed, and the seeming death, from moment to moment, becomes the source of ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... painting remains when the drama is almost obliterated; and it proves that Leonardo, when he chose, could withdraw himself from the delight of hand-to-mouth experience into a vision of his own, that he had the reserve and the creative power of the earlier masters and of that austere, laborious youth who taunted him. If it were not for "The Last Supper" we might doubt whether he could go further in art than the vivid sketch of "The Magi"; but "The Last Supper" tells us how great his passion for reality must have been, since ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... man, whose creative genius now employed thousands of industrious workmen, and Master Gerhard's name was mentioned with great ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... whose business is publishing a journal (or more than one), or editing a journal, or writing for journals, especially a person who is regularly employed in some responsible directing or creative work on a journal, as a publisher, editor, writer, reporter, critic, etc. This use of the word is comparatively modern, and it is commonly restricted to persons connected with daily or weekly newspapers. Many older newspaper men scout it, preferring to be known ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... pictures something which you never saw, but only conceived as a possible existence. Then there's the imagination which not only sees but hears—actually hears what a man would say on a given occasion, and entering into his blood, tells you exactly why he does it. The highest form is both creative and consecrative, if I may use the word, merging in diviner thought. It irradiates the world. Of that high power there is no evidence in the essay before me. To be sure there was little occasion ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... reached the gardening age. There is no doubt, however, that the appreciation of flowers, and the liking for things horticultural in general, is growing rapidly. The stimulus that compels hundreds to turn with delight to the joy in the creative work of growing things arises from a sound foundation. Comparatively few people, however, realize that this pleasure can be had by them around the entire circle of the months. They look forward to planting time in the spring and accept as inevitable the cessation ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... however, at the grand internal Sansculottism and Revolution Prodigy, whether it stirs and waxes: there and not elsewhere hope may still be for France. The Revolution Prodigy, as Decree after Decree issues from the Mountain, like creative fiats, accordant with the nature of the Thing,—is shaping itself rapidly, in these days, into terrific stature and articulation, limb after limb. Last March, 1792, we saw all France flowing in blind terror; shutting town-barriers, boiling pitch for Brigands: ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... it was there. She possessed the power which put her out of the category of commonplace, and had the most melodious "Open, Sesame!" with which to besiege the doors of the courts in which dwell artists—creative and interpretative. ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... its long-unchallenged legends become no more than nursery tales. The text-books of astronomy and geology work their way in between the questions and answers of the time-honored catechisms. The doctrine of evolution, so far as it is accepted, changes the whole relations of man to the creative power. It substitutes infinite hope in the place of infinite despair for the vast majority of mankind. Instead of a shipwreck, from which a few cabin passengers and others are to be saved in the long-boat, it gives mankind a vessel built to endure the tempests, and at last to reach ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... itself, take heed to its own security; let the nobles of England, if they mean to preserve that pre-eminence which, in some shape or other, must exist in every social community, take care to support it by aiming at that which is creative, and alone creative, of real superiority. Instead of matching themselves to supply wealth, to be again idly squandered in debauching excesses, or to round the quarters of a family shield; instead of continuing their names and honours in cold and alienated embraces, ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... institutional Catholicism must be approached from a different side. Troeltsch argues with much cogency that the Catholic Church must be regarded rather as the last creative achievement of classical antiquity than as the beginning of the Middle Ages. Its growth belongs mainly to the political history of Europe; the strictly religious element in it is quite subordinate. There is, as Modernist critics have seen, a real break between ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... evidences of man's intrusion upon the scene with which we were confronted; everything else was the work of Nature herself, untrammelled and uninterfered with; and it appeared as though in the riotous delight of her creative powers she had put forth all her energies in the production of strange and curious shapes and bewildering combinations of the richest and most dazzling colours. True, the water of the creek, which in consequence ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... facto musicians; and yet in boundless scope of possibilities it is just in its infancy. For who can limit the combinations of sound and rhythm, or forecast the range of the human imagination? The creative fancy of the composer is always in advance of contemporary taste and criticism. Hence, in listening to new music, we should beware of reckless assertions of personal preference. The first question, in the presence of an elaborate ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... Thus gladly, bend this way thy sharpen'd sight, That well my face may answer to thy ken; So shalt thou see I am Capocchio's ghost, Who forg'd transmuted metals by the power Of alchemy; and if I scan thee right, Thus needs must well remember how I aped Creative nature by ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... just mentioned the creative force of the Greeks attained its highest success. After the death of Pheidias his methods were carried on in a way by the sculptors who had worked under him and become subject to his influence; but ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... than that of legend, that the possessions on the Etruscan bank of the Tiber must have belonged to the original territory of Rome; for in this very quarter, at the fourth milestone on the later road to the port, lay the grove of the creative goddess (-Dea Dia-), the primitive chief seat of the Arval festival and Arval brotherhood of Rome. Indeed from time immemorial the clan of the Romilii, once the chief probably of all the Roman clans, was settled in this very quarter; the Janiculum formed a part of the city itself, and Ostia was ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... whenever personality is thus ascribed to what is literally neuter, there must be an assumption of one or the other sex: as, "The Genius of Liberty is awakened, and springs up; she sheds her divine light and creative powers upon the two hemispheres. A great nation, astonished at seeing herself free, stretches her arms from one extremity of the earth to the other, and embraces the first nation that became so."—Abbe Fauchet. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... of the imagination in creative work are so little comprehended by the great majority of men, it can hardly be expected that its practical uses will be understood. There is a general if somewhat vague recognition of the force and beauty of its achievements as illustrated in the work of Dante, ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... subterranean road, but the inhabitants of Paris in modern costume, each saving his most precious object and escaping with the Pope through the subterranean road to Montalbano, was a larger canvas and gave him more opportunities. As a creative artist he is in the fortunate position of being up to a certain point his own impresario, stage-manager and performer. Nevertheless he has to rely on the co-operation of his father and Gildo, and there is always the public to be considered, therefore it is ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... man lives forever. Nobody that was ever born was useful enough to live forever. The bigger a man is the longer his influence is creative, in art and everything else, but the time always comes when his value is spent. When the ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... fond covenant of love between parents, both of whom are tenderly concerned for the same object, find an image of complete humanity leagued in free love. The spirit of love which prevails between them acts with creative power upon the young mind, and awakens every germ of goodness within it. This invisible and incalculable influence of parental life acts more upon the child than all the efforts of education, whether by means of instruction, precept, or exhortation. If this be a true picture of the vast influence ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... pigmies, compared with the antecedent allied races. If Buffon had known of the gigantic sloth and armadillo-like animals, and of the lost Pachydermata, he might have said with a greater semblance of truth that the creative force in America had lost its power, rather than that it had never possessed great vigour. The greater number, if not all, of these extinct quadrupeds lived at a late period, and were the contemporaries of most of the existing ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... for the generative source of that creative power of thought in him, from his own mysterious intellectual being to its first cause, he still reflected, as one can but do, the enlarged pattern of himself into the vague region of hypothesis. In this way, some, at ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... that attribute, nothing in the constant appeal which we make to His forgiving grace to weary out that grace. And thus we may learn, even from the unfading glories of the heavens and the undimmed splendours of His creative works, the lesson that, in the holier region of His love, and His pardoning mercy, there is no exhaustion, and that all the past instances of His pardoning grace only make the broader, firmer ground of certainty ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... it is otherwise. Pure poetry is not the decoration of a preconceived and clearly defined matter: it springs from the creative impulse of a vague imaginative mass pressing for development and definition. If the poet already knew exactly what he meant to say, why should he write the poem? The poem would in fact already be written. For ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... in its full extent, and yet is is a very literal truth, that there lie hidden within us all, as in a sealed-up spiritual casket, or like the bottled-up djinn in the Arab tale, innumerable Powers or Intelligences, some capable of bestowing peace or calm, others of giving Happiness, or inspiring creative genius, energy and perseverance. All that Man has ever attributed to an Invisible World without, lies, in fact, within him, and the magic key which will confer the faculty of sight and the power to conquer is ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... friendly beings are very useful members of society. They are brighter companions and better talkers than the men who exhaust themselves in creative work and at odd times favor their friends with choice samples of literary irritability. John Kenyon wrote a few bright little things, but his best work was in the encouragement he gave others. He sought out all literary lions and tamed them with his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... his evolution permitted, he made himself better devices for killing than the old natural ones of fang and claw. He devoted himself to the invention of killing devices before he discovered fire or manufactured for himself religion. And to this day, his finest creative energy and technical skill are devoted to the same old task of making better and ever better killing weapons. All his days, down all the past, have been spent in killing. And from the fear-stricken, jungle-lurking, cave-haunting creature ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... divinely inexplicable child-passion is as unintelligible to those devoid of it, as its absence is marvellous to those possessed by it. Its presence is its justification, its being its sole explanation, itself its highest reason. Surely on those who cherish it, the shadow of the love-creative God must rest more than on some other women! Unpleasing as was the infant, to know him her own would have made the world a paradise to Jane. Her heart burned with divine indignation at the wrongs already heaped upon him. Hardly born, he was persecuted! ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... add that the act of creating a thing does not include only the processes of industry. The act of buying is creative. The riot of luxury trades in the United States will not end so long as the American woman remains a steady buyer of luxuries. The mobilization of women as workers is no more essential to the triumph of our cause, than ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... armoured beasts of prehistoric rocks are all bewilderingly like ourselves so far as physical construction goes; they had heart, brain, eyes, lungs, legs, a similarly planned skeleton; it seems as if the creative spirit was working by a well-conceived pattern, was trying to make a very definite kind of thing; there is not by any means an infinite variety, when one considers the sort of creatures that even a man could devise ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had laid the foundations of riches and power for other nations: her own immediate benefit from them was over. The period of prosperous repose which may be expected to follow one of great national activity was denied to her. When the house of Braganza recovered its rights, the impulse to creative ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... the imagination, the spirit, and even the heart might all find their congenial aliment in pursuits which, as some of their ardent votaries believed, would ascend from one step of powerful intelligence to another, until the philosopher should lay his hand on the secret of creative force and perhaps make new worlds for himself. We know not whether Aylmer possessed this degree of faith in man's ultimate control over nature. He had devoted himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific studies ever to be weaned from them by any second ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... conserve; they are patient and stable; they move about less; they more easily lay on adipose tissue. Compared with the female, the male animal is katabolic; he is active, impulsive, destructive, skilful, creative, intense, spasmodic, violent. Such a generalization as this must not be pushed too far in its applications to our daily life; but as a statement of basal differences it seems justified by ordinary observation as well ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... each varied power, Creative fancy, musings high, And thoughts that glance behind, ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... quite distinct in quality. Northern Italy is the home of the old masters in art and literature and of a new industrialism that is bringing renewed prosperity to Milan and Turin. Here the virile native stock has been strengthened with the blood of its northern neighbors. They are a capable, creative, conservative, reliable race. On the other hand, the hot temper of the South has been fed by an infusion of Greek and Saracen blood. In Sicily this strain shows at its worst. There the vendetta flourishes; and the Camorra and its sinister analogue, the Black Hand, but too realistically remind us ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... work thus with materials and upon models already prepared, without being drawn down to their level and subdued to their quality, requires, if possible, a higher order and exercise of power than to strike out in a way and with a stock entirely new. And so the absorbing, quickening, creative efficacy of Shakespeare's genius is best seen in this, that, taking the Drama as it came to his hand, a thing of unsouled forms and lack-lustre eyes, all brainless and meaningless, he at once put a spirit into ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... impressions of the same kind. The imaginative faculty is one of the earliest to appear, and a weakness of our educational systems is the failure to realize its importance and to pay sufficient attention to its development. It is well known that imagination is the creative power of the mind which gives life to all work, so that without it Newton would never have found the law of gravitation, nor Columbus have discovered America. The world of make-believe is filled with delight for the small child. He loves stories of imaginary adventure that he can act out ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... were lacking to make a real artist of his younger son. What ought to be said was very perplexing: the drawings were good enough in their way, the progress undeniable—but they were only copies, even when done from the living model—the creative spark, the individual artistic stamp, were absent. My husband allowed himself some time for consideration before warning Richard that he thought him mistaken in ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... proportion and beauty, whether in the shaft or the capital or the frieze or the pilaster or the pediment or the cornices, or even the mouldings,—everywhere grace and harmony, which grow upon the mind the more they are contemplated. The greatest evidence of the matchless creative genius displayed in those architectural wonders is that after two thousand years, and with all the inventions of Roman and modern artists, no improvement has been made; and those edifices which are the admiration of our own times ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... cosmogonies than that of Moses, whether contained in the sacred books of religions that have long existed, or professing to be based on modern scientific discovery, raise difficulties that are insuperable. Whence came matter if not from the creative word of God? To assign eternity to it is to invest it with an attribute that is Divine, and Pantheists carry such an explanation to its logical conclusion when they affirm that the universe is God. The existence of a single atom is an unfathomable ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... contempt. Disraeli's talents for entertaining fiction may not indeed have been altogether wasted in his official career; but he at least may pardon admirers of his writing, who regret that he should have squandered powers of imagination, capable of true creative work, upon that alternation of truckling and blustering which is called governing ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... language could not even be commenced unless the mind had been already in action and intelligently using the original language for that purpose. In fact the use by deaf-mutes of signs originating in themselves exhibits a creative action of mind and innate faculty of expression beyond that of ordinary speakers who acquired language without conscious effort. The thanks of students, both of philology and psychology, are due to Prof. ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... observed, was slightly built, rather short, and had scanty whiskers which developed into a little thicker tuft on his chin. His eyes were pure blue, like the blue of the speedwell. They were not piercing, but perfectly transparent, indicative of a character which, if it possessed no particular creative power, would not permit self-deception. They were not the eyes of a prophet, but of a man who would not be satisfied with letting a half-known thing alone and saying he believed it. His lips were thin, but not compressed into bitterness; and above everything there was in his face a perfectly ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... to observe the personal habits of her beloved and fashion her restrictions according to that standard. This meant that men made the laws and women administered them—a wise allocation of prerogatives, for she conceived that the executive female function was every whit as important as the creative faculty which brought these laws into being. She was quite prepared to leave the creative powers in male hands if they would equally abstain from interference with the subsequent working details, for she was of opinion that in ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... London and its vicinity has been depicted innumerable times, but never once translated into intelligible images; it is an "old, old story," never yet told, nor to be told. While writing these reminiscences, I am continually impressed with the futility of the effort to give any creative truth to ink sketch, so that it might produce such pictures in the reader's mind as would cause the original scenes to appear familiar when afterwards beheld. Nor have other writers often been more successful in representing definite objects ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... from Lehigh University in science, 1894. Now Dean of the College of Engineering, University of Cincinnati. Profession: civil engineer. Chief interests: advancing technical education, promoting scientific research, and planning methods to give free outlook to the creative genius of the country in science, art, music, literature, and every other phase of human endeavor. Author of "Education for Industrial Workers." First short story, "Arthur McQuaid, American," Outlook, May 23, 1917. At present, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... they should immediately behold the earth, the seas, the heavens; should consider the vast extent of the clouds and force of the winds; should see the sun, and observe his grandeur and beauty, and also his creative power, inasmuch as day is occasioned by the diffusion of his light through the sky; and when night has obscured the earth, they should contemplate the heavens bespangled and adorned with stars; the surprising variety of the moon, in her increase and wane; the ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... the creative musical power in the scale of human genius is difficult to determine; and will be differently estimated by different minds. That it is a heavenly gift of a high order, admits of no doubt; that it exercises over men's minds a mighty, and, under due safeguards, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... through the organisation of the work of others. He was extremely fertile in ideas, so fertile that it was quite impossible that he should personally develop them all, and realising this, he gave freely to his collaborators. The work which he inspired and to which he contributed the most important creative elements, I believe to be at least as important as that for which ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... when he returned that night, he was a very mean Charles-Norton. He spoke hardly a word at dinner, pretended he did not like the vanilla custard over which Dolly had toiled all day, her soul aglow with creative delight, sipped but half of his demi-tasse (as though the coffee were bitter, which it wasn't), and went off to bed early with a good-night so frigid that Dolly's little nose ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... the democratic loyalty to his fellow-men, he none the less clearly saw himself in certain ways becoming inexorably separated from his average fellow-man. The executive instinct was still as strong within him, but he felt it more creative, and he longed for finer material than the seamy side of man's petty strifes with man, made possible under those artificial laws which marked man's compromise with Nature. He found no solace and no science in the ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... begun, and they absorbed nearly all of his leisure during what might have been a productive period of his life. When he emerged from them he was fifty-four years of age, he had passed beyond the time of life when his creative powers were at their freshest, and the general habits of his life and lines of his activity had become ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... are superior to us, from that variety which is inferior to us, is made by Mr. Lock, in a Passage which I shall here set down, after having premised, that notwithstanding there is such infinite room between Man and his Maker for the Creative Power to exert it self in, it is impossible that it should ever be filled up, since there will be still an infinite Gap or Distance between the highest created Being, and the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... empty house into a furnished, restful place of beauty is no less a task than transforming a piece of paper into a lovely picture. In one sense, interior decoration is a creative art. It is true that decorators, or persons furnishing houses, do not weave their own hangings, build their own furniture, or design their own wall-paper, but they select the things they require from shops, where they have been designed ...
— Better Homes in America • Mrs W.B. Meloney
... drawn in any other way. Actually, of course, as many an old masterpiece admonishes us, there is no one canon in this matter, but, on the contrary, no limit to the variety of method and manner a creative artist is at liberty to employ in his imaginative treatment of human life. All one asks is that the work should live, the characters and scenes appear real to us, and the story be told. And Pater's Marius entirely satisfies this demand for those to whom such a pilgrimage ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... on the spirit of man. When the spirit by sanctification is fitted for an incorruptible body, then shall it be raised into a world of incorruption, and a celestial body shall burgeon forth thereto, the germ of which had been implanted by the redeeming and creative Word in this world. Truly hath it been said of the elect:—They fall asleep in earth, but awake in heaven. So St. Paul expressly teaches: and as the passage (1. 'Cor'. xv. 35—54,) was written for the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... chapters which are brought together here, consider the origin and the nature of English and European ethics. Hearn was an artist to the core, and as a writer he pursued with undivided purpose that beauty which, as Keats reminded us, is truth. In his creative moments he was a beauty-lover, not a moralist. But when he turned critic he at once stressed the cardinal importance of ethics in the study of literature. The art which strives to end in beauty will reveal even more clearly than more complex forms of expression the personality of the artist, ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... turns out successfully, fetches a double reward. It pays both in personal satisfaction, as a form of creative art, and also as a marketable commodity, which always is in great demand, and which can be cashed in to meet ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... the very highest military ability. "Genius," says Napier, "is not extravagant; it is ardent, and it conceives great projects; but it knows beforehand how to attain the result, and it uses the simplest means, because its faculties are essentially calculating, industrious, and patient. It is creative, because its knowledge is vast; it is quick and peremptory, not because it is presumptuous, but because it is well-prepared." And Swinton's verdict would have been approved by few of the soldiers of the Civil War. It was not the verdict of Lee. Significant indeed was the cry of the great Confederate, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... reflecting itself in activity, its brother quality, and we have a mixture of cognition and activity which is called Manas, the active mind; cognition reflected in activity is Manas in man or Brahma, the creative mind, in the universe. When cognition similarly reflects itself in will, then it becomes Ahamkara, the "I am I" in man, represented by Mahadeva in the universe. Thus wee have found within the limits of this cognition a triple division, making up the internal organ or Antahkarana—Manas, ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... understanding of his plays, but I do not regard such a study essential for the purpose. It is my belief that Schnitzler has given himself most fully and most typically in his dramatic authorship, and it is to this side of his creative production I ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... absurd security. The bank-notes, by some magic virtue which they possessed, had opened his eyes to the truth. And they presented themselves as absolutely indispensable to him. They had sprung from naught, they belonged to nobody, they existed without a creative cause in the material world—and they were indispensable to him! Could it be conceived that he should lose his high and brilliant position in the town, that two policemen should hustle him into the black van, that the gates of a prison ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... God, creative force, the Self, the I, the beginning or first cause. "Among letters I am the vowel A," says Krishna in the Bagavad. It is without colour, number ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... adorable one possesses knowledge, volition, and creative power; how then can he be destitute of qualities? or, if he is destitute of qualities, how can he be set forth by the Vedas? How can the absence of qualities be predicated of the sea of qualities, and yet all remonstrance be silent? Ponder it well ...
— The Tattva-Muktavali • Purnananda Chakravartin
... dream of the soul in matter is the perfect individual performance. I would impress upon the youth that in all arts and crafts, the dream fades and the spirit of the product dies away, when many are made in the original likeness. Nature does not make duplicates; her creative hallmark is upon every leaf and bee; upon every cliff ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... cutlasses, javelins, and other implements of war, which he used in a very peculiar and boisterous manner. As the mild and saintly Joanes was wont to prepare himself for his daily task by prayer and fasting, so his riotous countryman used to excite his imagination to the proper creative pitch by beating a drum, or blowing a trumpet, and then valiantly assaulting the walls of his chamber with sword and buckler, laying about him, like another Don Quixote, with a blind energy that told severely on the plaster and furniture, and ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... middle of the seventeenth century.... But it is not merely an authentic narrative. It is for the unconscious light which it sheds upon the life, manners, politics and literature of the country that it is valuable. Above all, it possesses the crowning quality displayed usually in creative poetry alone, of presenting a vivid mind picture of the character of the men with whom it deals. It has been called the 'Epic of the Sudan.' It lacks the charm of form, but in all else the description is well merited. Its pages are a treasure house of information ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... seriousness of life had been suddenly unfolded to her and had brushed off the ether-dust of harmless and joyful peace from her childish soul. The happy child had become a conscious maiden, and new thoughts, new feelings had sprung up within her. The first tears of sorrow had, with a mighty creative power, called all these slumbering blossoms of her heart into existence and activity, and her unconscious feelings had ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... sculptor and the painter of the age of Praxiteles precipitated art into sensuality; both of them destroyed its religious character, both of them raised it to high aesthetic perfection, but in both cases that perfection was followed by a speedy decline." Muller remarks, "The creative activity, the real central point of the entire activity of art, which fashions peculiar forms for peculiar ideas, must have flagged in its exertions when the natural circle of ideas among the Greeks had received complete plastic ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... milk-pail at her feet. Oft in her hand she chink'd the pence, The profits which arose from thence; While fond ideas fill'd her brain Of layings up, and monstrous gain, Till every penny which she told Creative fancy turn'd to gold; And reasoning thus from computation, She spoke aloud ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... bearings and journals. Herein a vast possibility in the mechanic art lies dormant—the size of the machine may be reduced, the speed and the power increased, realizing the conception of two things better done than one before. It is one of man's creative acts. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... castle. The important feature there lies in the fact that he has expressed a castle, and it is not for his teacher to draw undue attention to the fact that the corners are not well put together, but rather to listen to and to direct the story which centers about this effort at creative expression. A little later, however, it is clearly the business of the teacher to call attention to the quality of the dovetailing in which the boy at the manual training bench is engaged, for there is no value in dovetailing a box unless it is accurately done. ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... spokes, without a tire, or rather with six perfect little leaflets, fern-like, with a distinct, straight, slender midrib raying from the centre. On each side of each midrib there is a transparent, thin blade with a crenate edge. How full of the creative genius is the air in which these are generated! I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity, so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand. Nothing is cheap and coarse, ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... it is one thing to still our habitual thoughts and motions, but quite another to cause the spiritual self to arise. By our own efforts we can subdue the body-mind to some extent. Few of us, by our efforts alone, can activate our spiritual natures in a vital and creative way. We need God's help. We need the help of one another. But God's help may not come at once. Our help to each other, even though we are gathered in a meeting for worship or actively serving our fellow men outside of the meeting, may be and ...
— An Interpretation of Friends Worship • N. Jean Toomer
... we explain this national peculiarity? Was it because the religion of the Jews forbade creative imitation? Is it to be found in the letter or the spirit of the second commandment, which interdicts the making of graven images of any pattern in earth or heaven? We should hardly think so, since the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... counter-earth, on the other side of the sun, invisible to us."(260) Even Huygens was persuaded that when the number of the heavenly bodies had reached twelve, it could not admit of any further increase. Creative power could not go ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... it's complicated," continued Arthur, "but when you come to look into it it comes out clear enough. It is one of the instances of the omnipotence of capital. Parliament can do such a thing, not because it has any creative power of its own, but because it has the command of unlimited capital." Mr. Wharton looked at him, sighing inwardly as he reflected that unrequited love should have brought a clear-headed young barrister into mists ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... possible. Again and again I have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people's life, how those are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive. Only it must be real thought and real beauty; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... came a deep interest in the joys and sorrows of individual men and women; through his interest in this he was led back to a study of the mind of man and those laws which connect the work of the creative imagination with the play of the passions. He had begun again to think nobly of the world and human life." He was, in fact, a more thorough Democrat socially than any but Burns of the band of poets mentioned ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... have said to me, "I wish I could write poems. I often try, but——" They mean, I gather, that the impulse, the creative itch, is in them, but they don't know how to satisfy it. My own position is that I know how to write poetry, but I can't be bothered. I have not got the itch. The least I can do, however, is to try to help ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... literatures and like literature in general, it reveals to the student what noble ideals the soul of man has cherished, and striven to realize, and discloses the varied achievements of man's intellectual powers. If we of to-day are the witnesses and the offspring of an eternal, creative principle, then, in turn, the present is but the beginning of a future, that is, the translation of knowledge into life. Spiritual ideals consciously held by any portion of mankind lend freedom to thought, grace to feeling, and by sailing ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... turned my head, I went at night and kissed the spot where, to me, your feet had left their luminous traces. The air you had breathed was balmy; in it I breathed in more of life; I inhaled, as they say persons do in the tropics, a vapor laden with creative principles. ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... languidly in the night, {159a} and await the sun on high to contend with him in strength and grandeur, so doth genius halt and pause in the thraldom of outspread darkness, and move onward with all his vigour then only when creative light and jubilant ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... which this country has imported from Germany have come some customs to which the savants of both that country and this ascribe a certain fostering influence, if not a creative impulse, highly advantageous to the national scholarship. It is the habit of the university men of Germany to foregather of nights in the genial pursuit of drinking beer, and many of the notable theories which German scholarship ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... said in our first lecture, with reference to the colours produced by absorption, that the function of natural bodies is selective, not creative; that they extinguish certain constituents of the white solar light, and appear in the colours of the unextinguished light. It must at once occur to you that, inasmuch as we have in interference an agency by which light may be self-extinguished, ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... people are being taught it in many a classroom now. One of the basic principles of this new teaching is belief in the spiritual life but, when one inquires where the spiritual life is, he discovers that it is altogether within ourselves—there is no original, creative and abiding Spiritual Life from whom we come, by whom we are sustained, in whom we live. Rather, as flowers reveal in their fragrance a beauty which is not in the earth where they grow nor in the roots on which they depend, so our spiritual life ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... have given some indications of future renown. Of these last Germany's favorite bard is one. Born in the little village of Marbach, in the duchy of Wuertemberg, on November 10, 1759, he, when a child, evinced proofs of remarkable imaginative and creative power. At as early an age as six he showed that he possessed a fearless nature and an inquiring mind. A terrific storm was raging, and his parents searched for him in vain; the vivid lightning and the crashing thunder increased their anxiety, but they could find no trace of the child. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... spokesman of the genius of American democracy. He is not to discuss a question. He is to outline a character, he is to incarnate a principle. The essayist or philosopher may discuss the value of any given idea,—may talk about it; the creative artist alone can give us the thing itself, the concrete flesh-and-blood reality. Whitman is not only to make this survey, to launch this criticism; he is to embody it in a living human personality, and enable ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... memory, the world's experience, the world's failures. It teaches us where we came from. It tells us of the paths we have travelled. Almost all we know of the history of this world in which God has placed us we know from books. "In books," as Carlyle says, "lie the creative Phoenix ashes of the whole past—all that men have desired, discovered, done, felt, or imagined, lie recorded in books, wherein whoso has learned the mystery of spelling printed letters may find ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... for politics or manners. And yet, with all my ardor I was quickly subdued by a curt rebuke by my interlocutors (for Zimri was there as well), which was, quite simply, that you hadn't taken Homer for any more than a creative poet, even after a few thousand years of study, so why should my meager manuscript make such a large impact. At that, I acquiesced to them and admitted that on that end my attempt to save humanity one way or another was contemptible, but I still write, as you see, for the story's ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... extremely gifted dramatist, Emile Augier, the new type of serious drama passed over into the possession of the realists, and so downward to the latter-day realistic dramatists of France and England, Germany and Scandinavia. The supreme and the most typical creative figure of the entire period is, of course, the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, who—such is the irony of progress—despised the romantics of 1830, and frequently expressed a bitter scorn for those predecessors who discovered and developed the type ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... see liberty as the very substance of life, that indeed it is life, and that only the dead things, the choiceless things, live in absolute obedience to law. To have free play for one's individuality is, in the modern view, the subjective triumph of existence, as survival in creative work and offspring is its objective triumph. But for all men, since man is a social creature, the play of will must fall short of absolute freedom. Perfect human liberty is possible only to a despot who is absolutely and universally obeyed. Then to ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... imagined. He was of the class of Sully Prudhomme, of Matthew Arnold, of Lowell, to name three of his younger contemporaries. In his nature all was based upon equilibrium; his spirit, though full of graceful and philosophical intuitions, was critical rather than creative. He wrote little, and with difficulty, and in exquisite form. His life was as blamelessly correct as his literary art was harmonious. Wergeland knew nothing of the Danish tradition of his day, which he treated with violent and bitter contempt. ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... little fingers fluttered nervously over the music-strings—as the creative hand might do with a human heart of whose destiny there was a doubt. For an instant a pang of agony wreathed the young face to the depth of its expressions, but she resumed ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... Kantian system is the primacy of the will. The key to the mystery of man's being Kant finds, not in the marvellous faculty of intelligence, but in that power of self-movement, that capacity for self-originated energy which we call the will. Reason is "regulative," he said, but not "creative" and "constitutive," like the will. It is the latter faculty which makes us what we are, determines our life, fixes our character, and decides our destiny. As you act, so you are. This principle once conceded, the ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... years, and then some more, we have been slowly sifting down a whole mass of ill-assorted beliefs into two great facts: Creator and created. For practical purposes, isn't that all we need to know? Isn't it all that we any of us can grasp: the surety that the Creative Mind would never have taken the trouble to fashion us, in the first place if he hadn't put inside us all the needful germs of progress, all the needful intellect to grasp the evident duty that lies just ahead? What else, then, do you need? No. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray |
