You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

inspiration work creativity

About Jack London

Portrait of Jack London

John Griffith London (né Chaney; January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916), better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune...

More quotations from Jack London

Life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.

—Jack London in White Fang

doing life accomplishment achievement

Age is never so old as youth would measure it.

perception change youth old age

The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me. There is not a man aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whom he does not despise.

—Jack London in The Sea-Wolf

fear loneliness hatred

He does not lose anything, for with the loss of himself he loses the knowledge of loss.

—Jack London in The Sea-Wolf

ignorance knowledge loss

He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.

—Jack London in The Sea-Wolf

morality immorality

More quotations tagged with “creativity”

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.

wonder creativity comfort intuition

How many scholars are there whose single book or article has generated more intellectual energy than the collected works of other, quantitatively far more 'productive,' scholars? The commensurating device known as the 'tape measure' may tell us that a Vermeer interior and a cow plop are both twenty inches across; there, however, the similarity ends.

—James C. Scott in Two Cheers for Anarchism

art thought work creativity originality

Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there.

—E. H. Gombrich

creativity sewing

Beautiful things grow out of shit. Nobody ever believes that. Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they somehow appeared there and formed in his head—and all he had to do was write them down and they would be manifest to the world. But what I think is so interesting, and would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that's how things work. If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but and you're not one of them, you're just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life where you could say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, start from unpromising beginnings, and I'm an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.

art creativity effort originality

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

—Salvador Dali

creativity originality imitation

History

26 Jun 2013 Added