Discontent is at the root of the creative process: the most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way.

humanity discontent creativity

About Eric Hoffer

Portrait of Eric Hoffer

Eric Hoffer (July 25, 1902 – May 21, 1983) was an American philosopher and social critic. A moderate with an atypical working-class background, Hoffer wrote ten books over his career and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983. His first book, The True Believer (1951), was widely...

More quotations from Eric Hoffer

The practice of terror serves the true believer not only to cow and crush his opponents but also to invigorate and intensify his own faith.

It is a sign of a creeping inner death when we no longer can praise the living.

life death affection praise affinity

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

power faith corruption

You can never get enough of what you don't really want.

desire need fullness satiation

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

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

20 Dec 2014 Added