Henry George Quotes

To have nothing to do, to sit there waiting for little aches and pains, is fundamentally wrong. Life has to be lived.

The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything --and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the ''productive'' man a yet higher species.

None of us could be happy for long, doing nothing.

The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.

Generally speaking, everyone is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything.

Anxiety is part of creativity, the need to get something out, the need to be rid of something or to get in touch with something within.

I want to create a thousand paintings, maybe two thousand paintings, as many as I can draw.

It's unacceptable to just sit on the couch and say I'm not doing anything. You've got to get out and do everything you can.

Surely man was not created to be an idle fellow; he was not set in this universal orchard to stand still as a tree.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

I am not a person who can do nothing. I get very bored.

When I get an artistic itch, I have to scratch it.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings.

The soul is made for action, and cannot rest till it be employed. Idleness is its rust. Unless it will up and think and taste and see, all is in vain.

Idleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing is a dreary course to take, be sure of it. To live idle upon the substance of society! To be useless, that is to say, noxious! This leads straight to the lowest depth of misery.

Learned or unlearned we all must be scribbling.

Inspiration is intention obeyed.

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.

The urge for destruction is also a creative urge!

Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write [create]? Dig into yourself for a deep answer.

As I review the nature of the creative drive in the inventive scientists that have been around me, as well as in myself, I find the first event is an urge to make a significant intellectual contribution that can be tangible embodied in a product or process.

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA.

It does not in the least concern me whether I shall have at the end of my life thirty people who understand or three hundred. I am like an artist who paints a picture because he must, otherwise he is unhappy - not unhappy, but he must obey that creative impulse.