"Creative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the Whole to the self-seeking of the Individual. The spirit and constructive intention of the many to-day are no better than those of the few, poor and rich alike are over-individualized, self-seeking and non-creative; to organize the confused jostling competitions, over-reachings, envies and hatreds of to-day into two great class-hatreds and antagonisms will advance the reign of love at most only a very little, only so far as it will simplify and make plain certain issues. It may very possibly not advance ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... of the comparison, and only remarking, with reference to the Newgate Calendar, that its compilers have usually been very inferior wits, in fact attorneys, it must be owned that great creative and inventive genius, the most brilliant gifts of bright fancy and happy expression, and a glorious imagination, well-nigh seeming as if it must be inspired, have too often been found most unsuitably lodged in ill-living and scandalous mortals. Though few things, even in what is called Literature, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... is one of those that inevitably raise the question as to how far genius and creative imagination are made up of will-power, how far what is produced by great talent is sub-conscious inspiration virtually independent of effort. Although Shelley confines his assertions on the subject to poetry, he nevertheless seems to imply that creation of any kind has little to do ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... anybody should interfere with her desire. She was often in the habit of forgetting engagements and at times there was a faraway expression in her eyes, which may have come from having neglected to wear her glasses, but which her friends believed due to the thrall of some wonderful creative idea which might be presented to the world some day in the form of a great picture. And Eleanor, being but human and seventeen, had done her best to foster this belief. She would not dress in modern fashions like the other girls; ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... shook 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
... at the striking resemblance existing between two persons who are absolute strangers to each other, but in fact it is the opposite which ought to surprise us. Indeed, why should we not rather admire a Creative Power so infinite in its variety that it never ceases to produce entirely different combinations with precisely the same elements? The more one considers this prodigious versatility of form, the ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... that the Russian is so defective in the critical faculty as to balance the combined creative output of the greatest English dramatist against Gogol's one comedy, or even to attribute to it the literary value of any of Shakespeare's better plays. What the Russian's appreciation indicates is the pregnant role that literature plays in the life of intellectual Russia. Here literature ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... art is most interesting. We contemplate with awe the vast splendours of the consecutive civilizations of the East; the ancient richness and fertility of the whole of the Asiatic continent; the genius for empire and for commerce; the creative power which seemed to pour itself forth, unchecked by wars and conquests; the great dynasties which rose and fell, leaving behind them gigantic works, and the records of fabulous luxury in the empires ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... no novel," she calmly told me. "There never has been any novel. Heber did not finish it because he never began it. He did not possess the creative faculty. You were not content with what he gave. You asked of him that which he could not give. At first he played with you—it amused him. You were so gullible, so absurdly ignorant. Then he hesitated to undeceive you—in ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... more remarkable. Sir Walter Scott's first literary enterprise was a translation of /Goetz von Berlichingen/; and, if genius could be communicated like instruction, we might call this work of Goethe's the prime cause of /Marmion/ and the /Lady of the Lake/, with all that has followed from the same creative hand. Truly, a grain of seed that has lighted on the right soil! For if not firmer and fairer, it has grown to be taller and broader than any other tree; and all the nations of the earth are still yearly gathering of ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... is an inferior. His numbers and his equipment for war do not affect that sentiment, for it is recognized that all he has and does are the product of a lesson carefully learned, and that his masters always were and still are the southern and the western nations, with their vastly more creative spirit, their hardier grip in body as in mind, their cleaner souls, and their more varied ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... the reformation of the Roman law, his creative genius, enlightened by reflection and study, would have given to the world a pure and original system of jurisprudence. Whatever flattery might suggest, the emperor of the East was afraid to establish his private judgment as the standard of equity: in the possession of legislative power, he ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... RACE.—Some means for multiplying our race is necessary to prevent its extinction by death. Propagation and death appertain to man's earthly existence. If the Deity had seen fit to bring every member of the human family into being by a direct act of creative power, without the agency of parents, the present wise and benevolent arrangements of husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and neighbors, would have been superseded, and all opportunities for exercising parental and connubial love, in which so much enjoyment is taken, cut off. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... accepted as their sole function the idealization of form. They hold mostly that the highest aim of art should be to teach and elevate, to destroy prejudice and conventionality, and indicate, in so far as it is possible, the solution of moral problems through the creative faculty of inspired productiveness. The wish to inculcate action, the energy that is born of enthusiasm, the chivalry that is inspired by high ideals and unselfish motives. Raised thus from the region of mere chronicles of human passions, of woman's ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... his child is praying! See the freedom of God in his sunsets—never a second like one of the foregone!—in his moons and skies—in the ever-changing solid earth!— all moving by no dead law, but in the harmony of the vital law of liberty, God's creative perfection—all ordered from within. A divine perfection that were indeed, where was no liberty! where there could be but one way of a thing! I may move my arm as I please: shall God be unable so to move his? If but for himself, God might ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... 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
... of the living creation which involuntarily celebrates its Author. Ineffable concert, to which man alone has the sublime privilege of adding the accents of gratitude! Who is the author of this brilliant mechanism? I exclaimed in the transport which animated me. Who is He that, opening his creative hand, let fly the first swallow into the air? It is He who gave commandment to these trees to come forth from the ground, and to lift their branches toward ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... eve were glowing in the creative and flickering blaze of the vanished sun, that had passed like a monarch from the admiring sight, yet left his pomp behind. The golden and amber vapors fell into forms that to the eye of the musing Lothair depicted the objects of ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... which we should naturally seek for guidance would, of course, be the sayings of great workmen; but a sorrowful perception presently dawns on us that the great workmen have nothing to say. They are silent, absolutely in proportion to their creative power. The contributions to our practical knowledge of the principles of Art, furnished by the true captains of its hosts, may, I think, be arithmetically summed by the O of Giotto: the inferior teachers become didactic in the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... mankind? So far, you know, this is only your supposition. It may be the law of logic, but not the law of humanity. You think, gentlemen, perhaps that I am mad? Allow me to defend myself. I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering—that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD. But the reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make the ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... completing it only within a few weeks of his death. For years he had been degenerating as a writer, his physical condition was of the worst: it looked as if his life was quite over. Yet, by a sort of leaping-up of the creative flame out of the dying embers of the ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... likeness of what God has not created, namely, mat- 580:15 ter, sin, sickness, and death; the opposer of Truth, termed error; Life's counterfeit, which ultimates in death; the opposite of Love, called hate; the usurper 580:18 of Spirit's creation, called self-creative matter; immor- tality's opposite, mortality; that of which wisdom saith, "Thou ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... Creative people ought to have no—no home wires," Mr. Vandeford answered, and there was a queer sadness in his voice that he did not himself understand. "People with messages must have masses to hand them to. That's why you came, and, I ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... generously and then to have added music as a dominant power using all the abundant rest, and, as in Mendelssohn, finding expression for itself not only in the highest finish of execution, but in that fervor of creative work and theoretic belief which pierces devoted purpose. His foibles of arrogance and vanity did not exceed such as may be found in the best English families; and Catherine Arrowpoint had no corresponding restlessness ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... men, was constantly in need of money; and he had begun to be in some difficulty for subjects upon which to exercise his craft. The "Adventures of Captain Bonneville" (1837) was also a piece of skillful book-making rather than an original creative work; and after that nearly two years passed ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... part, as the French say, of the miraculous. She had come to consider the girl as a wonder of wonders, to hold that no human origin, however congruous it might superficially appear, would sufficiently account for her; that her springing up between Selah and his wife was an exquisite whim of the creative force; and that in such a case a few shades more or less of the inexplicable didn't matter. It was notorious that great beauties, great geniuses, great characters, take their own times and places for coming into the world, leaving the gaping spectators to make them "fit in," and holding from ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... fundamental principle of Christian belief is taken from the Nicene Creed, which is somewhat fuller than the similar declaration in the Apostles' Creed. It requires no comment. It is a statement of belief in a One Creative Power, from which all things have proceeded. There is no attempt made to "explain" the nature of the Absolute, or to endow it with any of the human attributes which theologians have delighted in bestowing upon the One. It merely asserts ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... the same effect on your mind as if it had been uttered in the morning when your attention had been lately refreshed by the pause of sleep. We are told on the first page of the Bible that even the Creative Energy of God rested on the "seventh day." You may be sure, then, that the frail finite mind of your audience will likewise demand rest. Observe nature, study her laws, and obey them ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... of English classics—great by reason of his creative power, simplicity, and pathos—has built the superstructure of his famous allegory upon the slender foundations of a dream. But just as the immortal work of John Bunyan had a very real support in truths and influences of the highest power and the deepest meaning, ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... tailor's shop, doing over and over again the same piece of squalid, meaningless work, with ever another squalid year stretching out its length before you when the last one has been completed. Is life so endured life—the sacred Creative gift, imparted to all things, conscious or unconscious, without restriction? Life, the mystery, which we are impotent to bestow, and which even death, self-inflicted or inflicted by others, cannot take ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... artificial literature sprang up in a nation which not only did not possess any national poetic art, but could never attain any such art. In antiquity, which knew nothing of the modern poetry of individual life, creative poetical activity fell mainly within the mysterious period when a nation was experiencing the fears and pleasures of growth: without prejudice to the greatness of the Greek epic and tragic poets we may assert that their poetry mainly consisted in reproducing the primitive ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... music has been marvelous on the appreciative and interpretive side. With such a musical awakening, we can look forward to the appearance of great creative genius right here in this country, perhaps in the near future. Why should we not expect it? We have not yet produced a composer who can write enduring operas or symphonies. MacDowell is our highest type as yet; but others will come who will ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... a message for the world. True, the term will not stretch thus far. But it is condescension that has made the trouble, as I shall try to prove; for all of us, even the tense ones, do patronize that creative instinct playing upon life as it is which in all times and everywhere is the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... and misery. In hell there is only misery. Therefore, happiness is the highest object of acquisition. The Earth is the progenitrix of all creatures. Females partake of her nature. The male animal is like Prajapati himself. The vital seed, it should be known, is the creative energy. In this way did Brahman ordain in days of old that the creation should go on. Each, affected by his own acts, obtains ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... paradox, this sub-division and con-addition of a One, must have taken place, so soon as ever eternal benevolence found itself alone; that is, in eternity, and not in any imaginable time. So then, the Being or Beings would probably not have been creative, but of the essence of Deity. Take also for an additional argument, that it is an idea which detracts from every just estimate of the infinite and all-wise God to suppose He should take creatures into his eternal counsels, or consort, so to speak, familiarly with other than ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... spiritual struggle involved. He instinctively went home, shunning the conflict; the others could not. In the Iliad the relation between the two wise men, Nestor and Ulysses, is subtly yet clearly drawn; the one—the younger man—has creative intelligence, the other—the older man—has appreciative intelligence. In the Odyssey, the relation is plainly evolved out of that described in the Iliad; the one is the boundless striver, the other rests in the ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... queen or king of spring that is fluttering above him,—he renders all this with a few strokes on a little block of wood not two inches square, upon which one may gaze for hours, so merry and lifelike a scene does it present. What a charming creative power is this, what a privilege—to be a god, and create little worlds upon paper, and whole generations of smiling, jovial men, women, and children half inch high, whose portraits are carried abroad, and have the faculty of making us monsters of six feet curious ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in the highest degree sensitive, excitable, enthusiastic. His imagination was singularly vigorous and creative; and no doubt it derived additional force from the habitual use of morphine, which he swallowed in great quantity, and without which he would have found it impossible to exist. It was his practice to take a very large dose of it immediately after breakfast each ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... association, worked in perfect unison, and the very differences in their characters enhanced the value of their co-operation; the special qualities of each friend mutually strengthened and completed each other. Yule's was by far the more original and creative mind, Baker's the more precise and, at least in a professional sense, the more highly-trained organ. In chivalrous sense of honour, devotion to duty, and natural generosity, the men stood equal; but while Yule was by nature impatient and irritable, and liable, until long past middle age, to occasional ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... by his brain, and blood, and bone, crushed and useless, and half a thousand human beings—looking forward to years of happiness—doomed to a terrific struggle with the elements. Strong, courageous, creative man—now a weak, fear- stricken, ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... season. It bears little resemblance in tone, spirit and object, to the other popular romances of the day. The author follows in the track of Fielding rather than Bulwer, and aims at representing the world as it is. Though his mind is not creative, it is eminently delineative, and he has succeeded in cramming into one volume a large variety of characters, each expressing one of the different forms of worldliness, and all belonging strictly to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... soldier-soul on the hardest of life's battlefields; and George Herbert, courtier, poet, and saint. "Often in that nameless discouragement," wrote Miss Hopkins, as she lay slowly dying, "before unfinished tasks, unfulfilled aims and broken efforts, I have thought of how the creative Word has fashioned the opal, made it of the same stuff as desert sands, mere silica—not a crystallised stone like the diamond, but rather a stone with a broken heart, traversed by hundreds of small fissures which let in the air, the ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... and gum Out of the old dark forest come; Where birds their beaks like hammers wield, And pith is pierced and bark is peeled; Where the green walnut's outer rind Gives precious bitterness to the wind; There lurks the sweet creative power, As lurks the honey in the flower. In winter's bud that bursts in spring, In nut of autumn's ripening, In acrid bulb beneath the mold, Sleeps the elixir, strong and old, That Rosicrucians sought in vain,— Life that renews itself again! What bottled perfume is so good As fragrance ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... the far-off world of cities and governments and the active scope of man, the magic land to her, where secrets were made known and desires fulfilled. She faced outwards to where men moved dominant and creative, having turned their back on the pulsing heat of creation, and with this behind them, were set out to discover what was beyond, to enlarge their own scope and range and freedom; whereas the Brangwen men faced inwards to the teeming life of creation, which ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... into hundreds of different characters, and of endowing it with the sublimest that in him lies, so overflowing is his gratitude. It is, in short, the recognition of the fact that the two sides of his nature remained faithful to each other, that out of free and unselfish love, the creative, ingenuous, and brilliant side kept loyally abreast of the dark, the intractable, and the ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... form in telling it will offend your literary taste—you who have made your name both as critic and creative writer—for you said once, I remember, that to tell a story in epistolary form is a subterfuge, an attempt to evade the difficult matters of construction and delineation of character. My story, however, is so slight, ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... be at least as gratifying as the evacuation of the bowels or bladder; while, if we take, as we certainly must, higher ground than this, an act which is at once the supreme fact and symbol of love and the supreme creative act cannot under normal conditions be other than the most pleasurable of all acts, or it would stand in violent opposition to all that ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... philosophy and folkways. It is quite impossible for us to disentangle the elements of philosophy and custom, so as to determine priority and the causative position of either. Our best judgment is that the mystic philosophy is regulative, not creative, in its relation to the folkways. They reacted upon each other. The faith in the world philosophy drew lines outside of which the folkways must not go. Crude and vague notions of societal welfare were formed from the notion of pleasing the ghosts, and from such notions of expediency as the opinion ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... that the entire populace, and even people superior by birth and influence, accepted it as a proven fact. If you ask me my opinion on this matter, I will answer that I do not believe any such power exists in creative nature, for I think that God reserves to himself this prerogative, as well as that of reading the hearts of men, or of granting wealth to those who have nothing; unless, that is to say, we are prepared to believe the Colchian fable concerning the renewal of AEson and the researches ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... much console Philip, who imagined that only some grand heroism could unlock the sweetness of such a heart; and Philip feared that he wasn't a hero. He did not know out of what materials a woman can construct a hero, when she is in the creative mood. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... was independent of her own desire or will, that it filled her heart without her sanction or command, just as her life-blood did; that it permeated her very being, when she neither sought nor expected it, and that as it was self-creative, so would it of itself find a satisfactory outlet in expressions and actions of ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... This is not evinced so much in creative directions as in poetical, musical, combinatory, inventional and what, if coupled with learning, we call literary imagination. Negro eloquence is proverbial. The crudest sermon of the most unlettered slave abounded in tropes and glowing tongue pictures of apochalyptic visions all his ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... that an idle, floating spirit can ever look up with clear eye to God; spreading its miserable anarchy before the symmetry of the creative Mind; in the midst of a disorderly being, that has neither centre nor circumference, kneeling beneath the glorious sky, that everywhere has both; and for a life that is all failure, turning to the Lord of the silent stars, of whose punctual thought it is, that "not one faileth." The heavens, ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... themselves, and he had done his best to catch its tone and to find Inspired Millionaires in Sir Isaac and Charterson and to bring it to their notice and to the notice of the readers of the Old Country Gazette. He felt that if only Sir Isaac and Charterson would see getting rich as a Great Creative Act it would raise their tone and his tone and the tone of the Old Country Gazette tremendously. It wouldn't of course materially alter the methods or policy of the paper but it would make them all feel nobler, and Blenker was of that finer clay that does ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... There rings the joyous peacock's scream, There stands the curlew by the stream, And holy hermits love to throng Where the sweet waters speed along. Ranged on the grassy margin shine Gay sandal trees in glittering line, And all the wondrous verdure seems The offspring of creative dreams. O conquering Prince, there cannot be A lovelier place than this we see. Here sheltered on the beauteous height Our days will pass in calm delight. Nor is Kishkindha's city, gay With grove and garden, far away. Thence will the breeze of ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... there are manifest signs of Sterne's unceasing interest in his own creations, and of his increasing consciousness of creative power. Captain Toby Shandy is but just lightly sketched-in the first volume, while Corporal Trim has not made his appearance on the scene at all; but before the end of the second we know both of them thoroughly, within and without. ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... the children drift, she concentrated all her powers on him. Her jealousy, her fears, her debts, sapped his fertile mind, destroyed his good humour, laid desolate his love of the beautiful and his creative power. ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... I am in the presence of an artist and his work. Louis Trudel had rule and measure, shears and a needle. Our friend here has eye and head, sense of form and creative gift. Ah, Cure, Cure, if I were twenty-five, with the assistance of Monsieur, I would show the bucks in Fabrique Street how to dress. What style is this called, Monsieur?" he suddenly asked, pointing ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... problem is not difficult to find. At a first view, it does seem to those whose vision had been limited to a contracted field, that the wide domain of time and space in which processes of development are found to take place is the universe itself, that to deny the formation of our earth by a special creative act is to deny the existence of a Creator, that to regard the beginning of our earth as a process of development is to assert that development has been in operation from the beginning of all things. But when we recognise clearly ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... has always lain chiefly in the perfecting of his tools. From the beginning he has had certain ideas, certain tendencies, a certain consciousness of things to express; he has been haunted, as only creative artists are haunted, by a world waiting to be born; and, from the beginning, he has built on a basis of criticism, a criticism of life. Part of his strength has gone out in fighting: he has had the sense of a mission. Part of his strength has gone out ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... great god of the cataract. He is shown as making man upon the potter's wheel; and in a tale he is said to frame a woman. He must belong to a different source from that of Ptah or Ra, and was the creative principle in the period of animal gods, as he is almost always shown with the head of a ram. He was popular down to late times, where amulets of his ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... night I lay in this state of creative joy and I know that my body remained motionless. It seemed that only a film divided me from the use of my limbs, but that film was definite. At eight o'clock on that morning, I became aware of a vague feeling of strain. It was a very slight sensation, but its effect ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... its present state, is so degraded, that the wonders of creative wisdom are, in a considerable degree, overlooked or undervalued. The heavens, with all their stars, and suns, and systems, exhibit few beauties to the great mass of inattentive spectators; and the observance of them, by day and by night, excites ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... course, behind any proposals for industrial peace there is a striving to catch sight of a future industrial society more content, more generous and creative than that of the present time. To the ordinary observer no such ultimate question appears to be involved in an ordinary wages dispute. Yet it is there. The trade union leader fighting for a wage increase does not always see his demand as a plain ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis
... was a writer "damned with faint praise," it was De Quincey. Some stupid writer for the London "Athenaeum," for instance, dared to compliment the poor "opium-chewer" after the following style:—"He possessed taste, but he lacked creative energy; and his subtle and highly refined intellect was ingenious and acute rather than powerful." This reminds me of a criticism once passed upon Shakspeare by a mere pedagogue, to the effect that the great poet had considerable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... that which describes a continuous repeated action. The pieces grew under His touch, and the disciples always found His hands full when they came back with their own empty. But wherever the miraculous element appeared, creative power was exercised by Jesus; and none the less was it creative, because there was the 'substratum' of the loaves and fishes. Too much stress has been laid on their being used, and some commentators have spoken ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... facts, but he seems to be standing at the beginning. The moral world is still without form and void, but the creative spirit is brooding upon it. "Sweet is the genesis of things." Emerson is pleased with the world, not because he thinks its present condition is very good, but because he sees so much room for it to become better. It is a most promising experiment. ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... 54, col. 1, it is said that the reason of the omission of the words, "And God saw that it was good," in respect to the second day of the creative week, was because hell-fire was then created; but see ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... and of creative spiritual activity, is a personal matter. From this deepening and enriching of the inner life of the individual proceeds creative spiritual activity, which attempts spiritual tasks as an end in themselves, ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... child's life play takes another form, the form of creative work. Boys build wagons and houses; girls cook, and make dolls. The "puppy play" of their early childhood has evolved into a form of creative activity that sooner or later grips every human creature. We want to plant, to build, to plan, to make. It is the creative power ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... confined to the arts. Politics, religion, science are subject to it,—in politics we call it conservative, in religion orthodox, in science we describe it as academic. Its manifestations are multiform but they have a common source. An original creative impulse of the mind expresses itself in a certain formula; posterity mistakes the formula for the impulse. A genius will use his medium in a particular way because it serves his need; this way becomes a fixed rule which the classicalist serves. It has ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... universe, to favour their own nation, to love their individual selves exclusively, to eliminate the true God from the world, to worship false gods fashioned from them selves, and at last to fancy themselves central and creative in the Cosmos. Adami ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... themselves at all; that good and evil stand judged in his work by the logic of events, as they do in nature, and not by any special pleading on his part. He does non hold a brief for either side; he exemplifies the working of the creative energy. . . . The great artist works in and through and from moral ideas; his works are indirectly a criticism of life. He is moral without having a moral. The moment a moral obtrudes itself, that moment he begins to fall from grace as an artist. . . . The great distinction ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... passed into the control of the Arte della Lana; but in that year, although Florentine affairs were by no means as flourishing as they should be, and a flood in the Arno had just destroyed three or four of the bridges, a new architect was appointed, in the person of the most various and creative man in the history of the Renaissance—none other than Giotto himself, who had already received the commission to design the campanile which should stand at ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... succeeded to Peter. It is in the French style of academical panegyric, a representation of the chaotic state in which Corneille found the French theatre, and of the light and order which he diffused through the dramatic world by his creative genius. A subject less interesting, or more unintelligible to a child, could scarcely have been selected. The lecture on the anatomy of Racine's thought, lasts through fifteen pages; according to all the rules of art, the dissection is ably performed, but most children ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... is very great, indeed, for the covenant is one of the great creative documents of human history. The peace treaty will fade into merciful oblivion and its provisions will be gradually obliterated by the great human tides sweeping over the world. But the covenant will stand as sure as fate. Forty-two nations gathered round it at ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... all true, and yet Genesis need not be false. Genesis begins with man as man, and not with man as a Monera—supposing he ever was such. But when scientists speak of the principle of life as being the outcome of an act of spontaneous generation without any external creative power, then we must disagree with them. The principle of life is hidden with God alone, and must come from God. Nor does it in any way affect our belief in Almighty God, whether He was pleased to create man from the first in "His own image," or whether He was pleased to make ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... received from hearing his music imperfectly performed were justified, for it has marked traits, which can be veiled, but not travestied; but to feel it as it merits, one must hear himself; only a person as exquisitely organized as he can adequately express these subtile secrets of the creative spirit. ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... common with imagination, but it implies more decidedly a creative power, and is referred to something tangible and real; whereas, in efforts of fancy and imagination, there is always a consciousness of unreality. The province of "conception" is that which has a real existence: ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... constitutes a very extensive branch of trade. Nothing short of the creative genius of the French could contrive to give, again and again, a new form to things the most common. In vain do females of other countries attempt to vie with them; in articles of tasteful fancy they ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... grew, was seen in the exquisite harmony of its colours, rather than the gorgeous diversities of their glow. His contemplation, intent upon objects of peaceful beauty, and undisturbed by rude anxieties and vehement passions, suggested only kindred reproductions to the creative faculty by which it was vivified; so that the whole man was not only a poet, but, as it were, a poem,—a living idyl, calling into pastoral music every reed that sighed and trembled along the stream of life. ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... resemblance, though the differences here are as numerous as the analogies. Roosevelt was not a clergyman, and not a creative writer, a novelist, or poet. His temperament was not very similar to Kingsley's. Yet the two shared a love for bold adventure, a passion for sport, and an eager interest in the life of animals and plants. Sport with Kingsley took the shape of trout fishing and of riding to hounds, not of ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... entire, but I would present him with a recueil of the most beautiful passages of that great poet; and I am sure he would be so delighted with them that he would readily join in the "All Hail" that the British nation awards him. Thus you may perceive the distinction I make between the creative genius who designs, and the artist who fills up the canvas; between the Poet and the Dramaturgus. I am probably singular in my taste as an Englishman, when I tell you that I prefer Shakespeare for the closet and Racine ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... impossible to believe that it might be otherwise with Ian Stewart. The majority of Ian's most trusted advisers were of the same opinion as the Master, since the number of persons who can understand the conditions necessary to the productiveness of exceptional and creative minds is always few. Besides, most people at bottom are in Martha's attitude of scepticism towards the immaterial ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... military situation may be said to be, the general outlook is far from bright. Our aims are impoverished, our creative energies are clogged by prejudice, our political vision is narrowed by party goals, and the forces inherent in the nation which should be employed in readjusting its life to the new conditions are being frittered ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... home, for he had not really lived a home life since he was fifteen years old, and he was fond of home; and, too, in the young ambition to become a writer and his efforts to achieve success, if not fame, in fiction, and in the first motions of his creative genius, there was enough to fill his mind, to provide him with active interest and occupation, and to abate the sense of loneliness in his daily circumstances: but as youth passed and manhood came, and yet fortune lagged with her gifts, this existence became insufficient ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... we had to continue to help create conditions of economic and social progress in the world. This work had to be carried forward alongside the first, not only in order to meet the non-military aspects of the communist drive for power, but also because this creative effort toward human progress is essential to bring about the kind of world we as free men want ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... 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
... almost white but a moment before, is converted into crimson by the sudden display of the red lining of their wings. A peculiarity in the beak of the flamingo has scarcely attracted due attention, as a striking illustration of creative wisdom in adapting the organs of animals to their local necessities. The upper mandible, which is convex in other birds, is in them flattened, whilst the lower, instead of being flat, is convex. To those who have had an opportunity of ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... first lesson we learn over here is that THOUGHT is not only Creative Power, as you are often told on earth, but it is also the very stuff out of which the creation must be moulded. It is, in very truth, ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... and of excellent education who in any other calling might easily make his mark, finds himself totally unable to win success in short-story writing and photoplay writing simply because, not having an imaginative or (in the literary sense) creative mind, he neglects the thousand-and-one opportunities to stock that unimaginative mind with ideas furnished wholesale by the life he sees about him every day, or by available books of reference, magazines and daily papers; and, last, but far from least in importance, ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... advanced Darwinians seem reluctant to acknowledge the intervention of an intellectual power in the diversity which obtains in nature, under the plea that such an admission implies distinct creative acts for every species. What of it, if it were true? Have those who object to repeated acts of creation ever considered that no progress can be made in knowledge without repeated acts of thinking? And what are thoughts but specific acts of the mind? Why should ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper
... a great writer a presentment of one of his most popular characters, as Mr. F. EDWIN ELWELL has done in his bronze statue of "Charles Dickens and 'Little Nell,'" is decidedly a pretty notion. "The child," looking up into the face of the great creative genius, who loved this offspring of his sympathetic fancy better than did all her other admirers, is a pathetic figure, and gives to the monument a more human and less coldly mortuary aspect than, unhappily, is usual in such work. It is a "touch of Nature" that ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... for laughter. The man who can make another capable of rule, clearly can teach him how to play the master; and if can make him play the master, he can make him what is grander still, a kingly being. [4] Once more, therefore, I protest: A man possessed of such creative power is worthy, not of ridicule, far from it, but ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... Goodness of their Author. The animal and the vegetable kingdoms have been made Man's instructors for ages past; and ever since the microscope has revealed so many unsuspected wonders, the argument from contrivance and design, Creative Power and infinite Wisdom, has been pressed with increasing cogency. The Heavens, from the beginning, have been felt to "declare the glory of GOD." One department only of Nature, alone, has all along remained ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... men perish sometimes from sheer untalked talk. For lack of a creative listener they gradually fill up with unexpressed emotion. Presently this emotion begins to ferment, and finally—bang!—they blow up, burst, disappear in thin air. In all that community I suppose there was no one but the little faded wife to whom the minister dared open his heart, ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... the Edinburgh criticaster. The golden is truth and honour incarnate: it possesses outsight and insight: it either teaches and inspires or it comforts and consoles, save when a strict sense of duty compels it to severity: briefly, it is keen and guiding and creative. Let the young beginner learn by rote what one master says of another:—"He was never provoked into coarseness: his thrusts were made with the rapier according to the received rules of fence, he firmly upheld the honour ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... that Wagner, as so many another creative genius, spent his love chiefly upon the beings that he begot within his own heart. Every genius is more or less a Pygmalion, and his own imagination is the Aphrodite that gives life to the Galateas that he carves. I have shown by this time that certain musicians ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... dead, without the hope of resurrection. If there is anything comes direct from the Creative ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... the greatest responsibility, who has the conscience for the general development of mankind,—will use religion for his disciplining and educating work, just as he will use the contemporary political and economic conditions. The selecting and disciplining influence—destructive, as well as creative and fashioning—which can be exercised by means of religion is manifold and varied, according to the sort of people placed under its spell and protection. For those who are strong and independent, destined and trained to command, in whom the judgment and skill of a ruling race is incorporated, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Shakespeare knew the whole of life, but how he came to know it is another matter. Brandes thinks he has found the secret. Back of every play and every character there is a personal experience. But this is rating genius altogether too cheap. One must concede something to the imagination and the creative ability of the poet. To relate everything in Shakespeare's dramas to the experiences of Shakespeare the man, is both ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... illiterate, young or old, rich or poor. All the material needed to fashion gods of was ignorance, and there was always an unlimited stock of that article. The artificer was imagination, a glorious faculty, which is the highest dower of the creative artist and the scientific discoverer, and in their service is fruitful in usefulness and beauty, but which in the service of theology is a frightful curse, filling the mental world with fantastic monsters who waylay ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... are the portraits good? Lady D.'s lace is perfect; Mrs. A.'s velvet is inimitable." Such observations strike the ear with painful discord, when the mind is filled with memories of those who are brave or independent enough to "look forward" with creative genius. There are many noble exceptions among our aristocracy; but with far too great a number art is a ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... good servant or to "finish" her for society. The activities of the Girl Scouts have been selected on quite a different plan. They have not been designed for women as women, but for women as human beings. Real work may be followed with a great deal of enjoyment provided it is creative and awakens the instinct of workmanship. But it is when at play that a human being realizes his own nature the most fully. So dancing, sports of all kinds, hiking, camping, boating, athletics and story-telling are encouraged not only ...
— Girl Scouts - Their Works, Ways and Plays • Unknown
... compulsory fiction, we are reminded that this question, with any answer which spirit might invent for it, belongs not to philosophy but to some special science like physiology, itself, of course, only a particular product of creative thought. Thus the more impetuously the inquisitive squirrel would rush from his cage, the faster and faster he causes the cage to whirl about his ears. He has not the remotest chance of reaching his ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... had no other aim but that of making verses for a composer; the latter, no other motive than the ordinary creative impulse prompting him to try his powers in a different and important sphere. The result on both sides could not therefore be other than phrases, although the better of the two proceeded from the composer, and that composer was Beethoven. To ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... expression of the face, nor in the treatment of the hair. He was daring in his art, for he not only imitated what he saw in life, but he also represented grotesque imaginary creatures, and in many ways proved that he had a rich creative fancy. ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... squandered as it had been at play. For five days, then, there is no repose for this laborious portion of Paris! It is given up to actions which make it warped and rough, lean and pale, gush forth with a thousand fits of creative energy. And then its pleasure, its repose, are an exhausting debauch, swarthy and black with blows, white with intoxication, or yellow with indigestion. It lasts but two days, but it steals to-morrow's bread, the week's ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... he argued, depended largely on the state of his emotions. He earned the family bread by the labour of his hands and his hand was the servant of his mind, and his mind a tempest of moods. Mary had applied herself to her task with creditable skill. She could always turn his sullenness to a sort of creative melancholy of which he was rather proud; his restlessness to energy and his discontent to something like constructive thinking. How she achieved the miracle he did not know, nor did he inquire. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... these things prove much with regard to the actual work being done by women artists, and the new influences, if such they be, that have made themselves felt during the last decade. Should we regard a work of art as an independent entity, the result of what is called "a separate creative act" on the part of the artist, with no relation to its environment, we must perforce conclude prenatal conditions in the painter which we are loath to admit. Hence we have no reason to be ashamed of the old masters. Critics there are ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother's milk ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... marks of 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 ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... to look at these painters of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries with some reference to the political condition of Florence and of Italy at that time. In truth, Florence during the period of its life was Italy,—the vivida vis, creative, contemplative, ornative, impulsive to the clay of Europe. The art of painting seems to spring full-grown into existence, with the appearance of Cimabue in the latter part of the thirteenth century. Even so the Italian language suddenly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... margins wide enough for new impressions, impressions which her broad mind, great enough and honest enough to confess its mistakes, always welcomed and understood, had long since made clear to her what in her early anxiety she had ignored: —that if her son had inherited the creative and imaginative gifts of his father (those gifts which she so little understood), he had also inherited from her a certain spirit of determination, together with that practical turn of mind which had given ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the characteristic of his genius. The majority of the lines lag and move heavily, and do not seem to me to rise much above mediocrity in the expression. The subject was attractive, and might have afforded space for the wild excursions of Collins's creative powers. As to the edition of Bell, in which it is pretended that the lost stanzas have been recovered, I have no more doubt that they are spurious than that I did not write them myself: I will not dwell upon this subject, but only ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... you may remember our saying originally, which causes things to exist, not previously existing, was defined by us as creative. ...
— Sophist • Plato
... human greatness. The light the age requires for its renewal can come only from the same source. The renewal of the age depends on the renewal of religion. The renewal of religion depends on a greater effusion of the creative and renewing power of the Holy Spirit. The greater effusion of the Holy Spirit depends on the giving of increased attention to His movements and inspirations in the soul. The radical and adequate remedy for all the evils of our age, and the source ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... slowly built up, and which foreign dynasties such as the Mongol and the Manchu had never touched. The Government of the post- Taiping period still imagined that by making their hands lie more heavily than ever on the people and by tightening the taxation control—not by true creative ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... architecture than that of Hellenic ages. The Universal Architect lingered lovingly in studying the effect of successive design. Trees of grace and beauty arose on every side in exquisite drapery, while softly curved outlines added harmony to the whole, teaching the wondrous and creative skill of the Divine. The picturesque river flows gently on, calm, placid, and unruffled save by an occasional splash of oars of the pleasure seekers, whose small white boats dotted the silvery surface and were reflected ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... particularly. You'll know what I mean when you've read these little volumes; and then I'll bring you some thirty volumes containing the letters and despatches and communications to Congress of these two greatest of all Americans. I don't know which I admire most. Hamilton was the most creative genius of his century, but the very fact that he was a genius of the highest order makes him hopeless as a standard. But all men in public life who desire to attain the highest and most unassailable position analyze the character of Washington and ponder over it deeply. There ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... the Christ after His Cross is parallel with and carries the same meaning as the rest of God after the Creation. Why do we read 'He rested on the seventh day from all His works'? Did the Creative Arm grow weary? Was there toil for the divine nature in the making of a universe? Doth He not speak and it is done? Is not the calm, effortless forth-putting of His will the cause and the means of Creation? Does any shadow of weariness steal over that life which lives and is not exhausted? ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... from the species being allied in different regions of the same continent, though specifically distinct. But I think one might on the creative doctrine argue with equal force in a directly reverse manner, and say that, as species are so often markedly distinct, yet allied, on islands, all our continents existed as islands first, and their inhabitants were first created on these islands, and since became ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... 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 ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... might bring to their door, or whatever his misfortune or the catastrophe falling on him. It was all deeply humiliating, and the inward dejection made her now feel that her body was the last effort of a failing creative power. So she sat down instead of standing up in a vain ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... they come forth from slime and mud,—fetid and crawling, unformed and monstrous. I grant exceptions; and even in the New School, as it is called, I can admire the real genius, the vital and creative power of Victor Hugo. But oh, that a nation which has known a Corneille should ever spawn forth a ——-! And with these rickety and drivelling abortions—all having followers and adulators—your Public can still bear to be told that ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... folk-tale is founded upon conceptions of life. I will take as an example the well-known story of Catskin. This story contains one remarkable feature running through many of the variants, and a second which is found in practically all of them. Both these features are perfectly impossible to modern creative fancy, and I venture to think we shall find their true origin in the actual facts of primitive life, not in the wondrous flight of ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... ART OF CONCENTRATING WITH PRACTICAL EXERCISE. A daily habit will wonderfully increase your concentration. Seeing yourself as you would like to be. Instruction of the greatest importance. The great creative spirit of the universe. Why things manifest as they do. The cosmic intelligence. A most desired state. How to receive messages from the universal mind. How to develop power, unknown to you before. Make your mind a powerful transmitter of thought. The best time to practice ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... unpleasing perplexity, to the orator; for he was an orator, though then unrecognised, and known only in his district. He was a pale and slender man, with a fine brow and an eye that occasionally flashed with the fire of a creative mind. His voice certainly was not like Hollaballoo's. It was rather thin, but singularly clear. There was nothing clearer except his meaning. Endymion never heard a case stated with such pellucid art; facts marshalled with such vivid simplicity, and inferences so ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... at last are Bible women revealed through the sympathetic, creative imagination of a woman, who with great dramatic sense lifts one out of the present into Bethsaida and Capernaum." The Bookman says: "There is poetry of spirit, deep, clear understanding, and fine revelation. Imaginative—yes, but fine spiritual ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... prominent and laborious part, were 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
... Titian. Think you if we had not been, our pictures had never been painted? Others had done them, or better, the same. We are only Pencils God paints with. And think you that He had wanted for pencils But for our being at hand? And yet—for some virtue creative Dwells and divinely exists in the being of every creature, So that the thing done through him is dear as if he had done it— If I should see your power, a tint of this great efflorescence, Fading, methinks ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... MONTAIGNE, written about a generation later, the spirit of the Renaissance, which had filled the pages of Rabelais with such a superabundant energy, appears in a quieter and more cultivated form. The first fine rapture was over; and the impulsive ardours of creative thought were replaced by the calm serenity of criticism and reflection. Montaigne has none of the coarseness, none of the rollicking fun, none of the exuberant optimism, of Rabelais; he is a refined gentleman, who wishes to charm rather than to electrify, who writes in the ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master—something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will perhaps for ...
— Charlotte Bronte's Notes on the pseudonyms used • Charlotte Bronte
... In the church of St. Peter's at Rome, is kept, en secret, a large stone emblem of the creative power, of a very peculiar shape, on which are engraved [Greek: Zeus Sôtêr]. Only persons who have great interest can get a sight of it. Is it from this stone having some peculiar virtue that those preux chevaliers, the cardinals, keep it so closely? Perhaps they ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... that of the earth and Montalluyah. Many are inhabited by beings, of whom some partake of our nature; some are of a nature and consistency entirely different to ours; some can only give effect to their will through a material medium; some possess creative powers, and can, by the sole exercise of will, invent the most lovely forms of beauty, and transmit themselves to immeasurable distances with the rapidity ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... Hapi is addressed by the names of Ptah and Khnemu, not because the writer thought these three gods were one, but because Hapi as the great supplier of water to Egypt became, as it were, a creative god like Ptah and Khnemu. Next we see that it is stated to be impossible to depict him in paintings, or even to imagine what his form may be, for he is unknown and his abode cannot be found, and no place can contain him. But, as a matter of fact, several pictures and sculptures of H[a]pi have ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... 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 will would be to command and achieve, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... umbras and penumbras, which the unsearchable depths of man's nature is capable, under adequate excitement, of throwing off, and even into stationary forms. I shall have occasion to notice this point again. There are creative agencies in every part of human nature, of which the thousandth part could never be revealed in ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... art, is superior in his mastery of metal to any one we could name in Europe. How many artists worthy of a place in the rank are only known to us by a single piece, but which is quite sufficient to evidence their power! From 1790 to 1840 art was at fever heat, the creative ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... aided or retarded by the slow effects of elevation or depression from the earth's shrinkage towards its own centre. Geology, in short, has shown us that the world is what it is, not by virtue of a single sudden creative act, nor by virtue of successive terrible and recurrent cataclysms, but by virtue of the slow continuous action of causes ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... than to prodigally expended effort. Eleanor never wore a costume which did not show the copious exercise by some alert-minded human being, presumably with an immortal soul, of the priceless qualities of invention, creative thought, trained attention, and prodigious industry. Mrs. Hubert's unchallengeable slogan was that dress should be an expression of individuality, and by dint of utilizing all the details of the attire ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... creative; but Mephistopheles, the spirit that denies, is destructive. A negative attitude of mind is not favorable for the production of works of art. The best periods of art have also been periods of spiritual or philosophical ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... characterized, was Tasso; the second in tender harmony, Ovid; and the third, entitled Anacreon, was to partake of the gayety of the dithyrambus. I tried my skill on the first act, and applied to it with an ardor which, for the first time, made me feel the delightful sensation produced by the creative power of composition. One evening, as I entered the opera, feeling myself strongly incited and overpowered by my ideas, I put my money again into my pocket, returned to my apartment, locked the door, and, having close drawn all the curtains, that every ray of light might be excluded, I went to ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... that in like manner the baby should be left at liberty spiritually, because creative Nature can also fashion its spirit better than we can, we do not mean that it should be neglected ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... person can do! I consider travelling useful for every one, from the prince to the travelling journeyman. But we allow too many people to travel! We are not rich, therefore restrictions should be made. The creative artist, the poet, the engineer, and the physician must travel; but God knows why theologians should go forth. They can become mad enough at home! They come into Catholic countries, and then there is an end of them! Wherefore ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen |
