Rollo May Quotes

A creative moment is part of a longer creative process which, in turn, is part of a creative life.

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.

Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy.

Creativity begins with an affinity for something. It's like falling in love.

One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire.

What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?

Vision is the true creative rhythm.

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.

I believe in creative work.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great.

In my mind, creativity is consciousness.

Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway to life.

Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness... bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.

Artists love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.

To create one must be able to respond. Creativity is the ability to respond to all that goes on around us, to choose from the hundreds of possibilities of though, feeling, action, and reaction and to put these together in a unique response, expression or message that carries moment, passion and meaning. In this sense, loss of our creative milieu means finding ourselves limited to only one choice, divested of, suppressing, or cendoring feelings and thoughts, not acting, not saying, doing, or being.

Creativity arises out of the state of thoughtless presence in which you are much more awake than when you are engrossed in thinking.

I think the important thing about staying creative and staying sharp and original is not to look back too much.

Creativity has nothing to do with any activity in particular - with painting, poetry, dancing, singing. It has nothing to do with anything in particular.

Of the truly creative no one is ever master; it must be left to go its own way.

Creativity is magic. Don't examine it too closely.

Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.

Inspiration is the opportunity of genius.

One must indeed be ignorant of the methods of genius to suppose that it allows itself to be cramped by forms. Forms are for mediocrity, and it is fortunate that mediocrity can act only according to routine. Ability takes its flight unhindered.