Emily Dickinson Quotes

I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene.

Nature is the fountain's head, the source from whence all originality must spring.

I found the poems in the fields And only wrote them down

In just - Spring when the world is mud- luscious the little lame balloonman whistles far and wee

To the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

Creativity does not belong exclusively to professional artists and geniuses; it is the birthright of every single human being. Creativity is our common heritage. You don’t need to quit your job and move to Paris in order to lay claim to this heritage - all you have to do is clear some space in your life for whimsy, invention, sensory pleasure, and play. Most of all, you have to learn how to follow your curiosity more than your fear.

Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.

Imagination is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.

Mental illness and creativity are - it's a thin line in between the two. I tend to believe that.

A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.

The imagination is one of the forces of nature.

I think the coming of spring, the stars overhead, the first snowfall and so on are gifts for a child, a young poet.

There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium!

Art is a little bit larger than life - it's an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.

Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

I could cut a star out of paper and drop it.

Only a lunatic would think that art is superior to nature.

Take a quart of nature, boil it down to a pint, and the residue is art.

Woo the muse of the odd.

... the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.

The basis of artistic creation is not what is, but what might be; not the real, but the possible. Artists create according to the same principles as nature, but they apply them to individual entities, while nature, to use a Goethean expression, thinks nothing of individual things. She is always building and destroying, because she wants to achieve perfection, not in the individual thing, but in the whole.

The best pictures are always those one dreams of when one is smoking a pipe in bed, but which never get done. But still one ought to try, however incompetent one may feel before the unspeakable perfection and radiant splendour of nature.

Art is the child of Nature.

It is possible that a picture will move far away from Nature and yet find its way back to reality. The faculty of memory, experience at a distance produces pictorial associations.