The quote library
Frankisms
Short truths, collected over a lifetime of writing and teaching. Read a few, or lose an afternoon.
- Collected
- 126
“Ideas don’t flag themselves to get our attention. — Chip Heath”
creativity
“If the creative process is anything, it is a continual learning process in which mistakes help guide you toward greater and greater competence. — Robert Fritz”
creativity
“If there is but little water in the stream, it is the fault, not of the channel, but of the source. — Saint Ambrose (c. 340397), Letter 17”
creativity
“If you can write a question, you can answer it. — Natalie Goldberg”
creativity
“If you want to know about a tree, go to the tree. — Basho, the great seventeenth-century Haiku master”
creativity
“If you’ve lived ten years, you have enough writing material for your whole life. — Natalie Goldberg”
creativity
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. — Albert Einstein, On Science”
creativity
“Imagination is the true magic carpet. — Norman Vincent Peale”
creativity
“In a sense, your creativity is like your blood. Just as blood is a fact of your physical body and nothing you invented, creativity is a fact of your spiritual body and nothing that you must invent. — Julia Cameron”
creativity
“In the creative process, it is never a good idea to lose touch with reality. — Robert Fritz”
creativity
“In the creative process, love is generative rather than simply responsive. — Robert Fritz”
creativity
“It isn’t enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box. — Timothy Ferriss”
creativity
“It’s good to plant a seed. Nothing grows without one. — Natalie Goldberg”
creativity
“Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues. — Phillips Brooks (18351893), Literature and Life”
creativity
“Limited funds are a blessing, not a curse. Nothing encourages creative thinking in quite the same way. — H. Jackson Brown Jr”
creativity
“Many of us find that we have squandered our own creative energies by investing disproportionately in the lives, hopes, dreams, and plans of others. — Julia Cameron”
creativity
“Memory is not stored alphabetically in a file cabinet. — Natalie Goldberg”
creativity
“Men are created different. They lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other. — David Riesman”
creativity
“Monitoring your daydreaming can be a powerful method for you to understand yourself and your desires. — Cecil Murphey”
creativity
“Most creators use experimentation as a tool for learning how to better create a result. — Robert Fritz”
creativity
“Most of us never consider how powerful the creator really is. Instead, we draw very limited amounts of the power available to us. We decide how powerful God is for us. — Julia Cameron”
creativity
“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened. — Michel de Montaigne”
creativity
“Name the greatest of all the inventors. Accident. — Mark Twain”
creativity
“No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist. — Oscar Wilde”
creativity
“Nothing pains some people more than having to think. — Martin Luther King Jr”
creativity
“Observation is the basis of everything. — Bill Gilbert”
creativity
“Once in seven years I burn all my sermons. For it is a shame if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago. — John Wesley”
creativity
“Opening your imagination to the ridiculous opens your mind to what you’re not otherwise seeing. In other words, it makes room for the genius to come through. — Beth Brandon”
creativity
“Originality lies in the struggle for authenticity, not eccentricity. — Robert McKee”
creativity
“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. — Pablo Picasso”
creativity
“Paying attention to simple little things that most men neglect makes a few men rich. — Henry Ford”
creativity
“People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others. — Blaise Pascal”
creativity
“People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined. — Julia Cameron”
creativity
“People from all walks of life, and from all backgrounds, can learn to create, in the same way that they can learn to drive a car, swim, or use a computer. — Robert Fritz”
creativity
“People who avoid all criticism fail. It’s destructive criticism we need to avoid, not criticism in all forms. — Timothy Ferriss”
creativity
“People who don’t have nightmares don’t have dreams. — Robert Paul Smith”
creativity
“Reality is an acquired taste, but it is the best foundation upon which to base your creative process. All else may turn out to be quicksand. — Robert Fritz”
creativity
“Reason is God’s crowning gift to man. — Sophocles (495-406 BC), Antigone, 1.672”
creativity
“Some of the best creative work gets done on the days when you feel that everything you’re doing is just plain junk. — Julia Cameron”
creativity
“Tension seeks resolution. The tension is a wonderful force because, as it moves toward resolution, it generates energy that is useful in creating. — Robert Fritz”
creativity