Creativity & Art

Arts and sciences are not cast in a mould, but are found and perfected by degrees, by often handling and polishing, as bears leisurely lick their cubs into shape.

Michel de Montaigne Essais

J'aime fort la vérité, mais je n'aime point du tout le martyre.

Voltaire Candide & Philosophical Dictionary

Division of labor is a justification for sloth.

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace & A Calendar of Wisdom

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?

William Shakespeare First Folio & Sonnets

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

Oscar Wilde De Profundis & Essays

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Mark Twain Notebooks & Autobiography

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: First and Second Series

This world is but canvas to our imaginations.

Henry David Thoreau Walden

A prayerful heart is the vehicle and service makes the heart prayerful.

Mahatma Gandhi The Story of My Experiments with Truth

A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.

Nelson Mandela Long Walk to Freedom

It is possible and imperative that we discover A brave and startling truth.

Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings & Essays

The really good music, whether of the East or of the West, cannot be analyzed.

Albert Einstein Ideas and Opinions

Science is, at least in part, informed worship.

Carl Sagan Cosmos & Pale Blue Dot

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.

Viktor Frankl Man's Search for Meaning

My heart, the bird of the wilderness, has found its sky in your eyes.

Rabindranath Tagore Gitanjali & Stray Birds

If you sing of beauty though alone in the heart of the desert you will have an audience.

Kahlil Gibran The Prophet

...MacDonald, in a veritable furor of intellectual integrity and moral honesty sets out to hunt down his "mistakes" without ever changing the record in the slightest, his technique being to annotate his earlier articles with refutations of himself.

Hannah Arendt The Human Condition

To "catch" a husband is an art; to "hold" him is a job.

Simone de Beauvoir The Ethics of Ambiguity

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Bertrand Russell The Conquest of Happiness

... happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination, resting on merely empirical grounds,

Immanuel Kant Critique of Practical Reason

So live as brave men; and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts

Cicero De Officiis & Tusculan Disputations

On Ps 60:3: “To Thee have I cried from the ends of the earth.

Augustine of Hippo Confessions

I make no doubt... that these rules are simple, artless, and natural.

Blaise Pascal Pensées

You may break your heart, but men will still go on as before.

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

[Seneca] would have denounced the opinion to which most philosophers, tacitly or otherwise, have come round in the last half-century, that it is no part of the business of philosophy to turn people into better persons, as tantamount to desertion or lèse-majesté.

Seneca Moral Letters to Lucilius

Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan.

Epictetus Discourses & Enchiridion