Morris Raphael Cohen Quotes

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.

Reason is a fine thing, but it is not the only thing available to a writer. It's just part of the arsenal of many things available to a storyteller. Revelation, for example.

I'm nosey, and I have a great imagination. So it's not necessarily things I have to go through, but it's things people I know or my family is going through, and I hear about it, and I think, 'That sounds like a great song.'

To be creative means to connect. It's to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction.

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

Faith is almost the bottom line of creativity; it requires a leap of faith any time we undertake a creative endeavor, whether this is going to the easel, or the page, or onto the stage - or for that matter, in a homelier way, picking out the right fabric for the kitchen curtains, which is also a creative act.

What a fine line there is between artistry and insanity. There's no formula for it, and I think a lot of people when they're around you - even those closest to you - when you're in that whirl of creativity and you're grabbing those things out of the air, there's no rational process.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

I want to create. I think that's the one word I can grow on.

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

The imagination is part of the arsenal that actors draw from.

My style of songwriting is influenced by cinema. I'm a frustrated filmmaker. A fan once said to me, 'Girl, you make me see pictures in my head!' and I took that as a great compliment. That's exactly my intention.

All great discoveries are made by men whose feelings run ahead of their thinking.

Art, it seems to me, doesn't need freedom so much as it needs courage and love - some would call it 'soul' or 'Eros.'

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist.

The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you.

Vision is the true creative rhythm.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

I don't know where I got the idea for 'The Great Thumbprint Drawing Book'; I just told my brain to think of a book, and it did.

A visual understanding of great composition and how to use a camera and expensive lenses can be learned, but drive and a real hunger for making photos and telling stories... I don't think that part can be learned. You either have that inside, or you don't.