Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I feel like it's important, especially at young age, to find exactly what it is that makes your style so important as opposed to just trying to fit into the iconic styles of performers out there.

Knowledge comes from the past, so it's safe. It is also out of date. It's the opposite of originality... Experience is the opposite of being creative.

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world

Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.

Never follow anyone else's path, unless you're in the woods and you're lost.

Write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

If you spend your life walking through somebody else's museum, you never find out whether you're Rembrandt or not.

I don't care anymore if people dress like me, now I want them to think like me.

What you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style, so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that it is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought.It is an awfully lonesome business, and, as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all, I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.

I think the beauty of the film industry is that if another person tries to become another person or act like another person or imitate another person, they don't really get too far. When that person starts to realize who they are and what they can bring to the table, they start to blossom and grow. With that, it's not so much me looking towards my predecessors who have paved the way in the industry - it's more getting inspired. I get little bits and pieces of what I can take from any and everybody.

I can't imagine being anything creative in a major town because everybody's doing the same exact thing you're doing. How can you not get confused about what you yourself are doing?

If you're always looking at someone else, trying to imitate them, how can your natural gifts ever emerge?

I think if you study--if you learn too much of what others have done, you may tend to take the same direction as everybody else.

Don't be someone else's slogan because you are poetry.

I just try to be myself and not conform to something I'm not and just continue doing what I do. I just try not to think about the fact that I'm an inspiration for people.

Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.

I believe that education is all about being excited about something. Seeing passion and enthusiasm helps push an educational message.

Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

The best thing for an actor is to try it his way. The way they do it may not work, but it may inspire me to try something else.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

Growing up, I think I always had a sense of art: a sense that there was poetry in the world. I didn't know where I was going to find it. I didn't know where I was going to fit in, that was for sure. But I kept moving forward. There wasn't a future in anything other than movement.

The great man who gives a true transcript of his mind fascinates and instructs. Most writers suppress individuality. They wish to please the public.