Eric Hoffer Quotes

There are two avenues from the little passions and the drear calamities of earth; both lead to the heaven and away from hell-Art and Science. But art is more godlike than science; science discovers, art creates.

The creative process requires chaos before form emerges.

Creating-that is the great salvation from suffering.

A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.

Like all artists, I go through creative spurts.

Everything is raw material to me. Land is raw material... I take one form and transform it into other forms.

Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely.

Art is about building a new foundation, not just laying something on top of what's already there.

That's what I love more than anything, just creating.

Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.

You might say that a creative person is a person who simply has a desire to have something, to add something to the world that's not there yet, and goes about arranging fort that to happen. When you desire a work of art and make it, you've added to the stock of art in the world. Artists are one of the people who can do that: add to the stock of things.

Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all.

Inspiration is tough to define, it comes from so many different places. I have multiple exhibitions touring the globe, so I do travel quite a bit and travel is a great way to find inspiration.

In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.

Without playing with fantasy, no creative work has yet come into being.

The creative act is not hanging on, but yielding to a new creative movement. Awe is what moves us forward.

It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, ‘live always at the ‘edge of mystery’­—the boundary of the unknown.’ But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.

The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations - more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.

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.

When things get tough... Make good art.

We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.

The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation.

Is it an original idea? Or is it something where you're literally a creative collagist? You're taking pieces of the world that you see around you and that are inside of you and put them together in a way that you see fit.

Interesting things happen when the creative impulse is cultivated with curiosity, freedom and intensity.

Private imaginings may have no outcomes in the world at all. Creativity does. Being creative involves doing something.