Rollo May Quotes

Art is longer than life.

Creativity involves putting your imagination to work. In a sense, creativity is applied imagination.

Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.

By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death.

Not to be boxed in, to be able to transcend boundaries: for an artist, it's essential.

I always wanted to be really experimental.

Creativity is an ode to life. It is not a form of entertainment. It is a form of joy.

The noblest works and foundations have proceeded from childless men, which have sought to express the images of their minds where those of their bodies have failed.

Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.

Creativity is as important as literacy.

The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.

Where are Shakespeare's imagination, Bacon's learning, Galileo's dream? Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton's thought severe? Methinks such things should not die and dissipate, when a hair can live for centuries, and a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years. I am content to believe that the mind of man survives, somehow or other, his clay.

Creativity, which is the expression of our originality, helps us stay mindful that what we bring to the world is completely original and cannot be compared.

Immortality is a by-product of good work. Masterpieces are not for artists, they're for critics. Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together. My message to the world is 'Let's swing, sing, shout, make noise! Let's not mimic death before our time comes! Let's be wet and noisy!'

You make something from things that have happened and from things that exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, and you make something through your invention that is truer than anything true and alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

Folks wanna be like Will I Am not Bill I Am. They wanna be like Stevie Wonder not Steve Jobs.

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.

Death will destroy my body, but my creatures will keep on living ever after, in the years to come.

The beauty of poetry is that the creation transcends the poet.

Years from now, after I'm gone, someone will listen to what I've done and know I was here. They may not know or care who I was, but they'll hear my guitars speaking for me.

If you stick with a vision, it might not all work, but some of it will be absolute genius. To me, 15 minutes worth of absolute genius in a film is so much better than two hours of mediocrity. I would rather pay to see something different like that.

My respect for artists is very high. I think to get the most out of them, you have to liberate them. I think part of liberating them is saying, 'Come up with something brilliant, new, and fresh. Stop thinking based on what has been beat into you by executives or publishers in terms of what's going to work and what's not. Don't react, just act.'

Tradition can, to be sure, participate in a creation, but it can no longer be creative itself.

Since we have had a history, men have pursued an ideal of immortality.

Someone who copies a Van Gogh does not therefore become Van Gogh, and the same would go for Mozart or anyone else who contributed something that was original. Certainly in the way that I described visualizing numbers in abstract, meaningful shapes.