Great Throughts Treasury

"The new meaning of soul is creativity and mysticism. These will become the foundation of the new psychological type and with him or her will come the new civilization." - Otto Rank, born Otto Rosenfeld

"The chief enemy of creativity is good sense. " - Pablo Picasso, fully Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

"The end point of an indigenous scientific process is a known and recognized place. This point of balance, referred to by my own tribe (Oneida) as the Great Peace, is both peaceful and electrifyingly alive. In the joy of exact balance, creativity occurs, which is why we can think of our way of knowing as a life science." - Apela Colorado, aka Pamela Colorado

"In the creative vision of God the individual is present as a whole in his essential being and inner teleos and at the same time in the infinity of the special moments of his life process. Of course this is said symbolically, since we are unable to have a perception of or even an imagination of that which belongs to the divine life. The mystery of being beyond essence and existence is hidden in the mystery of the creativity of the divine life." - Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich

"In this country we encourage "creativity" among the mediocre, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow "too much."" - Pauline Kael

" Real creativity will die out. Instead, we shall get a multitude of mediocre pseudo-thinkers and vulgar groups and organizations. Our belief systems will turn into a strange chaotic stew of science, philosophy, and magical beliefs. “Quantitative colossalism will substitute for qualitative refinement.” What is biggest will be regarded as best. Instead of classics, we shall have best-sellers. Instead of genius, technique. Instead of real thought, Information. Instead of inner value, glittering externality. Instead of sages, smart alecs. The great cultural values of the past will be degraded; “Michelangelos and Rembrandts will be decorating soap and razor blades, washing machines and whiskey bottles.”" - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." - Albert Einstein

"They [say] everybody's creative. Well, everybody is. But any real creativity has to rest on a basis of an acquired technique and an acquired knowledge; you can't be creative in a void, or you just get a mess." - Robertson Davies

"I say to myself, go on seeking, be glad for being sensitive, be glad you're able to go beyond the resistance inside you. It is our resistance to what we experience that makes creativity possible. So don't get rid of resistance like that by going around it or trying to eliminate it. Our own limitations put up strong resistance, but it's because of that that we are creators." - Roger Schutz, aka Frère Roger, Brother Roger of Taize, baptised Roger Louis Schütz-Marsauche

"Leaders have the courage to face inevitable conflict openly and head on. Whenever strong willed people interact on a frequent basis, there will be occasional disagreements and conflict. The effective leader recognizes this as a fact of life and does not shy away from conflict because of the tension and stress involved." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"The absence of authority enables one to deviate from the norms of authoritative decision-making." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"I’m talking about science on the leading edge, where it’s not clear which way things are going be cause we don’t know, and I’m dealing with areas which we don’t know about." - Rupert Sheldrake, fully Alfred Rupert Sheldrake

"The cumulative nature of the evolutionary process, the fact that memory is preserved, means that life grows not just through a random proliferation of new forms, but there's a kind of cumulative quality..." - Rupert Sheldrake, fully Alfred Rupert Sheldrake

"Young people need plenty of difficulties to achieve something.... If you receive a little money for this, a little money for that, everything becomes mediocre, and collapses ignominiously." - Salvador Dalí, fully Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech

"Ideally, schools exist to preserve and regenerate learning and the arts, to give children the tools with which they may create the future. At worst, they produce uniform, media-minded grown-ups to feed the marketplace with workers, with managers, and with consumers. The child we were and are learns by exploring and experimenting, insistently snooping into every little corner that is open to us—and into the forbidden corners too! But sooner or later our wings get clipped. The real world created by grown-ups comes to bear down upon growing children, molding them into progressively more predictable..." - Stephan Nachmanovitch

"Music represented symbolically is regarded as more acceptable than music which happens in real time as sound. We have fallen under the sway of a strange inversion in which symbols are regarded as more real than the realities they represent. Music (or art, literature, science, technology) is often treated as a collection of works arranged in a historical timeline. The scores are regarded as having not only an independent existence, but a higher existence than a performance." - Stephan Nachmanovitch

"From a large planet of overwhelming magnitude, unlimited resources and endless mystery, the Earth has suddenly become a small planet, thoroughly explored, limited in resources, and reduced in mystery." - Thomas Berry

"There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis

"The quickest method for understanding and living your purpose, is to ask yourself if you're thinking in loving ways." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them." - Wendell Berry

"Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences. When the individual's behavior and consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of external actions, he is a dead robot, and it is time for him to die and be reborn. Time to "drop out," "turn on," and "tune in."" - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

"There is no information to indicate she meets the high bar necessary for the next justice on the Supreme Court." - Eli Pariser

"Another base unit and being alone are two different things, when be lonely It's easy to fool yourself and think you you are going on the right path but being alone is better for us because it means you will be alone without feeling you are single , but in the end, it is best that you are looking for one person serve as a mirror for you to remember that you cannot really see yourself, but at the heart of another person and the existence of God P inside." - Elif Safak

"Do not be scared where it leads the way. Instead, focus on the first step. This is the hardest part and that of her liability. Once you do the first step, let everything follow its natural course, and the rest will be ordered only. Not drift. You yourself be over." - Elif Safak

"The tragedy of life that Searles is referring to is the one we have been discussing: man's finitude, his dread of death and of the over­whelmingness of life. The schizophrenic feels these more than any­one else because he has not been able to build the confident defenses that a person normally uses to deny them. The schizo­phrenic's misfortune is that he has been burdened with extra anxieties, extra guilt, extra helplessness, an even more unpredictable and unsupportive environment. He is not surely seated in his body, has no secure base from which to negotiate a defiance of and a denial of the real nature of the world. The parents have made him massively inept as an organism. He has to contrive extra-ingenious and extra-desperate ways of living in the world that will keep him from being torn apart by experience, since he is already almost apart. We see again confirmed the point of view that a person's character is a defense against despair, an attempt to avoid insanity because of the real nature of the world. Searles looks at schizo­phrenia precisely as the result of the inability to shut out terror, as a desperate style of living with terror. Frankly I don't know any­thing more cogent that needs to be said about this syndrome: it is a failure in humanization, which means a failure to confidently deny man's real situation on this planet. Schizophrenia is the limiting test case for the theory of character and reality that we have been ex­pounding here: the failure to build dependable character defenses allows the true nature of reality to appear to man. It is scientifically apodictic. The creativity of people on the schizophrenic end of the human continuum is a creativity that springs from the inability to accept the standardized cultural denials of the real nature of ex­perience. And the price of this kind of almost "extra human" crea­tivity is to live on the brink of madness, as men have long known. The schizophrenic is supremely creative in an almost extra-human sense because he is furthest from the animal: he lacks the secure instinctive programming of lower organisms; and he lacks the secure cultural programming of average men. No wonder he appears to average men as "crazy": he is not in anything's world." - Ernest Becker

"There is the type of man who has great contempt for "im­mediacy," who tries to cultivate his interiority, base his pride on something deeper and inner, create a distance between himself and the average man. Kierkegaard calls this type of man the "introvert." He is a little more concerned with what it means to be a person, with individuality and uniqueness. He enjoys solitude and with­draws periodically to reflect, perhaps to nurse ideas about his secret self, what it might be. This, after all is said and done, is the only real problem of life, the only worthwhile preoccupation of man: What is one's true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique, and how can he express this unique­ness, give it form, dedicate it to something beyond himself? How can the person take his private inner being, the great mystery that he feels at the heart of himself, his emotions, his yearnings and use them to live more distinctively, to enrich both himself and man­kind with the peculiar quality of his talent? In adolescence, most of us throb with this dilemma, expressing it either with words and thoughts or with simple numb pain and longing. But usually life suck us up into standardized activities. The social hero-system into which we are born marks out paths for our heroism, paths to which we conform, to which we shape ourselves so that we can please others, become what they expect us to be. And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, or by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate." - Ernest Becker

"I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

"I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air?that progress made under the shadow of the policeman?s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave? In any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is my instinct to side with the citizen? I am against all efforts to make men virtuous by law." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

"Who has no courage must have legs." - Italian Proverbs