creativity

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

As long as I can remember I feel I have had this great creative and spiritual force within me that is greater than faith, greater than ambition, greater than confidence, greater than determination, greater than vision. It is all these combined. My brain becomes magnetized with this dominating force which I hold in my hand.

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity.

We know too much and feel too little. At least we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life spring.

Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?

It is my conviction, and in this I think I concur with both James and Whitehead, that we participate in this Creative Passage as bodily event at a depth and fullness not manageable at the cognitive level. . . . In all of [life] there are depths of awareness accompanying the bodily event of living and experience that yield conditions of knowing which language may not convey, or, for that matter, cannot convey. Whitehead expressed this point in those memorable words, "Mothers can ponder many things in their hearts which their lips cannot express." [Cf. Luke 2:51.] Meland continues this passage by speaking of ways in which men, children, and adolescents, also, ponder experiences which they cannot express verbally.

We live by trust, in part by hope, in part by inquiry, patiently and humbly pursued. And to the degree that these sensibilities of our creaturehood are observed, the pursuit of intelligibility and understanding in [our] faith is a creative adventure full of promise in expanding, sensitizing, illumining, and hopefully fulfilling this pilgrimage of existing. Every other mode of seeking to wrest the fire and efficacy of reality, either by way of sanctioning those who presume to believe, or as ground for registering reality's curse upon those who presume not to believe in accordance with the prescribed language of human forms and symbols, is blasphemous, and carries within its own degree of dementia. And this, I submit, is the judgment of reality itself; not of any human formulation dependent upon the language of our fallible forms and symbols.

Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.