Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

I don't believe that a writer does something wonderful spontaneously. I believe it's the result of years of living, of study, reading, his very personality and temperament. At one particular moment, all these come together and the artist 'expresses' himself.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

With my pictures, what I hope is that it encourages the reader to imagine more pictures of his own.

What I want to happen is to be really creative, and to play something new in the improvisations, every time.

Think of the imagination as a giant stone from which we carve out new ideas. As we chip away, our new ideas become more polished and refined. But if you start by editing your imagination, you start with a tiny stone.

I'm just gonna keep growing as an artist, and I'm excited to work with different people and learn from all these other talented, creative people that I've been around. It's so inspiring to be around other people who have ideas you haven't thought of, and all of a sudden you're like, 'Wow! That's so amazing!'

I always imagine, and try to be on the lookout, for new things, for references that can inspire me creatively so I can showcase things that people haven't done before or that are new.

Really, I get inspired by just switching projects and instrumentation and things like that - that creative part of just being different every time is really what inspires me.

As an artist, you tend to gravitate to the opposite. I know, when I finish a song or an album, I'm interested in doing something completely new. It doesn't always happen, but that's the idea. My poor fans - I don't know if they love that or hate that.

I've said, for a long time, my favorite part of my career is when I'm creating a new thing where I'm pulling from a new place.

I just like to stay creative. Anything that can keep my mind going.

Every great inspiration is but an experiment.

Study detains the mind by the perpetual occurrence of something new, which may gratefully strike the imagination.

Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there.

Studying creativity is not an elite distraction, but provides one of the most exciting models for living.

If in the well and truly made martini DeVoto finds "water of life" and the blessing to the spirit, so also DeVoto's The Hour brings to its readers the breath of life and a vision of themselves made generous, indomitable and wise.

The imagination, once awakened, must and will work, and ought to work

Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.

I decided to do what I do when I was 2 years old. At 2 years old, you know, I heard the sound of a drum playing in the village, and I found my own drum and just picked it up and started playing, the worst song ever written by Wyclef Jean.But it actually started a vibe.

I'm always looking for something to engage my imagination and take me on a little mental voyage. I just want a new topic in my life.

Sometimes listening to music can motivate you. It can. But if you're a musician, that isn't always the way to get new ideas because you don't want to take somebody else's ideas. You need to find your own. So if you go to different artistic mediums, whether it's dance or it's visual arts or films or books, stories, sometimes it gets you hearing things, hearing progressions that you wouldn't come up with if you were just listening to other music because you don't want to copy progressions you've just heard.

Save interesting thoughts, quotations, films, technologies... the medium doesn't matter, so long as it inspires you.

A box is more a coffin for the human spirit than an inspiration.