"Creative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with his hand to the enormous heap of oysters; and I could well understand that this mine was inexhaustible, for Nature's creative power is far beyond man's instinct of destruction. Ned Land, faithful to his instinct, hastened to fill a net which he carried by his side with some of the finest specimens. But we could not stop. We must follow the Captain, who seemed to guide him ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... much console Philip, who imagined that only some grand heroism could unlock the sweetness of such a heart; and Philip feared that he wasn't a hero. He did not know out of what materials a woman can construct a hero, when she is in the creative mood. ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... no mere virtuoso but a true artist. His musical nature shows itself in his compositions, which are thoroughly suited to the nature of the violin, and have a noble, dignified character and considerable charm of melody, though they show only moderate creative power. He had few pupils, but his influence through his example during his travels, and through his compositions, was very ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... almost cried out as he saw the face of Wilton Barnstable become an impressionistic portrait of the soul of Logan Black. He looked at Barton Ward. Barton Ward was now looking like Wilton Barnstable's conception of Cleggett. But Watson Bard, less facile and less creative, still clung stolidly to the popular conception of ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... the edict rang As when Creation into being sprang! Nature, not clearly understanding, tried To make a bird that on the air could ride. But naught could baffle the creative plan— Despite her efforts 'twas almost a man. Yet he had risen—to the bird a twin— Had she but fixed a wing upon ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... relations. The loneliness of intense individuality is the loneliest loneliness in the world,—a loneliness which crowds only aggravate, and which even the closest and happiest companionship can only in part cure. The creative faculty is the most inalienable and uncontrollable of individualities. It is at once its own reward and its own penalty: until it has conquered the freedom of its own city, in which it must for ever dwell, more ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... resentment which makes the revolutionary spirit. His personality was essentially that of a student; conservative instincts were stronger in him than the misery which accused his fortune. A touch of creative genius, and you had the man whose song would lead battle against the hoary iniquities of the world. That was denied him; he could only eat his own heart in despair, his protest against the outrage of ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... Unnamable 4. Buddha, the Universal Life 5. Life and Change 6. The Pessimistic View of Ancient Hindus 7. Hinayanism and its Doctrine 8. Change as seen by Zen 9. Life and Change 10. Life, Change, and Hope 11. Everything is Living according to Zen 12. The Creative Force of Nature and Humanity 13. Universal Life is Universal Spirit 14. Poetical Intuition and Zen 15. Enlightened Consciousness 16. Buddha Dwelling in the Individual Mind Enlightened Consciousness is not an Intellectual Insight ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... been limited to a contracted field, that the wide domain of time and space in which processes of development are found to take place is the universe itself, that to deny the formation of our earth by a special creative act is to deny the existence of a Creator, that to regard the beginning of our earth as a process of development is to assert that development has been in operation from the beginning of all things. But when we recognise clearly that vastness and minuteness, prolonged and brief duration, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... could not at once so state the matter? What is the great truth of Hebrews i.? Jesus Christ is GOD (ver. 8); the Son (ver. 2); absolutely like the Father (ver. 3); Lord of the bright Company of Heaven, who in all their ranks and orders worship Him (ver. 6); creative Originator of the Universe (ver. 10), such that the starry depths of space are but the folds of His vesture, which hereafter He shall change for another (ver. 12); Himself eternal, "the same," transcendent above all time, yet all the while the Son begotten, the Son, infinitely ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... made you the offer I did once upon a time to come in with me. There are positions to-day in New York with a salary of half a million a year waiting for men who can fill them. If I could find one man of the highest order of creative and executive ability who would stand by me in my enterprises I could be the richest man in the world in ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... once vindicates Scott from the charge of never being able to wind up a novel,—with such subsidiary sketches as Gurth, Prior Aymer, Isaac, Front-de-Boeuf (Urfried, I fear, will not quite do, except in the final interview with her tempter-victim), Athelstane, and others—give such a plethora of creative and descriptive wealth as nobody but Scott has ever put together in prose. Even the nominal hero, it is to be observed, escapes the curse of most of Scott's young men (the young men to several of whom Thackeray would have liked to be mother-in-law), and if he is not worthy of Rebecca, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... cash than to prodigally expended effort. Eleanor never wore a costume which did not show the copious exercise by some alert-minded human being, presumably with an immortal soul, of the priceless qualities of invention, creative thought, trained attention, and prodigious industry. Mrs. Hubert's unchallengeable slogan was that dress should be an expression of individuality, and by dint of utilizing all the details of the attire of herself and of her two daughters, down to the last ruffle and buttonhole, ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... duly the glorious epoch which we have just entered. To this reply there are two rejoinders: (1) let special suburbs be founded for Edvardian buildings; (2) there are no really Edvardian buildings, and there won't be any. Long before the close of the Victorian Era our architects had ceased to be creative. They could not express in their work the spirit of their time. They could but evolve a medley of old styles, some foreign, some native, all inappropriate. Take the case of Mayfair. Mayfair has for some years been in a state of transition. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... among the admirable dealings of the author with his proper subject, and popping out upon us in unexpected places, the most delightfully naif German onslaughts on the degradation of theologians, and the utter incompatibility of so many reflex adaptations to the environment with the existence of a creative intelligence. There was a time, remembered by many of us here, when the existence of reflex action and all the other harmonies between the organism and the world were held to prove a God. Now, they are held to disprove him. The next turn of the whirligig may bring ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... our calling, friends! creative art, (Whether the instruments of words she use Or pencil pregnant with ethereal hues,) Demands the service of a mind and heart Though sensitive, yet in their weakest part Heroically fashioned—to infuse Faith in the whispers of the lonely muse, While the whole world seems adverse to desert Great ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Citadel of Light, To tread the dreadful way of human birth, His shadow sometimes fell upon the earth And those who saw it wept with joy and fright. "Thou art Apollo, than the sun more bright!" They cried. "Our music is of little worth, But thrill our blood with thy creative mirth Thou god of song, thou ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... analogy entitles us to do, that intelligence holds the same relative supremacy in the universe which it holds in us, and the first positive condition of a Deity is established, in the establishment of the absolute priority of a free creative intelligence. On the other hand, let us suppose the result of our study of man to be, that intelligence is only a product of matter, only a reflex of organization, such a doctrine would not only not afford no basis on which to rest any argument for a God, but, on the contrary, ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... them—there was nothing admirable in Diogenes as a patron. We next passed upon Socratus. Sons of Sophroniscus had a lofty sound; still his system of moral philosophy was not acceptable, and as he believed in a creative God, his doctrine was too like a religion. Though the Delphian oracle pronounced him the wisest of mankind, we concluded to look further, and in so doing, came to Epicurus. There we stopped. His promulgations, we ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... literary labours with such unbounded and feverish anxiety. By the time Ernest had finished his second sheet of white foolscap—much erased and interlined with interminable additions and corrections—Edie ventured for a moment briefly to interrupt his creative efforts. 'Don't you think you've written as much as makes an ordinary leader now, Ernest?' she asked, apologetically. 'I'm afraid you're making it a good deal longer than it ought to be ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... say that the Russian is so defective in the critical faculty as to balance the combined creative output of the greatest English dramatist against Gogol's one comedy, or even to attribute to it the literary value of any of Shakespeare's better plays. What the Russian's appreciation indicates is the ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... something he did not want to do before; he views all the universe in a new light through his tears; he is gay or enthusiastic, melancholy or passionate, as things come and go to him. Therefore the high creative poet might even be thought, to a great extent, impassive (as shallow people think Dante stern), receiving indeed all feelings to the full, but having a great centre of reflection and knowledge in which he stands serene, and watches the feeling, as ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... spent in a chair in a squalid tailor's shop, doing over and over again the same piece of squalid, meaningless work, with ever another squalid year stretching out its length before you when the last one has been completed. Is life so endured life—the sacred Creative gift, imparted to all things, conscious or unconscious, without restriction? Life, the mystery, which we are impotent to bestow, and which even death, self-inflicted or inflicted by others, cannot take away; which one thing only can take away—the death-in-life of penal imprisonment; ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... surface of shining metal had walled him in, enabling him to grapple with reality on a completely adult level. For twenty-seven days he had gone pridefully back through Time, taking creative delight in watching the heritage of the human race unroll before him like a cineramoscope ...
— The Man from Time • Frank Belknap Long
... even solitary emotions. As this has a particular application to the emotions of the Englishman, I will return to the topic once more. Now Americans have a power that is the soul and success of democracy, the power of spontaneous social organisation. Their high spirits, their humane ideals are really creative, they abound in unofficial institutions; we might almost say in unofficial officialism. Nobody who has felt the presence of all the leagues and guilds and college clubs will deny that Whitman was national when he said he would build states and cities out of the love of comrades. When all this ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... business as a process in which a man used money to make more money. He had been accustomed to buy and sell, to deal with tokens rather than with things themselves. Now he found himself at the primitive source of things and he learned, a little to his astonishment, the pride of definitely planned creative work. He began to understand that lesson which many men never learn, the pleasure of pure achievement even ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... his life was not a long one; it did not reach to sixty years. But during the working years allotted him, before a mystical melancholy—which was threatening to degenerate into madness—had impaired his faculties, his mind was unusually brilliant, creative and marvelously disciplined. It obeyed at will. At one time he was professor of Latin in Lausanne; at another time he held the chair of Slavic languages in Paris. He taught Polish and Latin in Kovno. He traveled extensively in Italy in the interest ...
— Sonnets from the Crimea • Adam Mickiewicz
... losing his sight that he was no longer able to see correctly? Were his hands no longer his own that they refused to obey him? And thus he went on winding himself up, irritated by the strange hereditary lesion which sometimes so greatly assisted his creative powers, but at others reduced him to a state of sterile despair, such as to make him forget the first elements of drawing. Ah, to feel giddy with vertiginous nausea, and yet to remain there full of a furious passion to create, when ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... the half step and develop along the line of pentatonic character is sometimes seen in our own children when they follow their natural bent in singing. It has been my observation that children with some musical creative ability, but unaccustomed to hearing modern music with its half steps, almost invariably hum their bits of improvised melody in the ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... night, and what a sight! Raining hard, a strong wind blowing, and the thick, black, inky darkness every now and then illuminated by the flash of the guns. Death was certainly in evidence to-night. One felt it. The creative genius of the weirdest, imaginative artist could not have painted a scene of death so truthfully. The odour arising from decaying bodies in the ground was at ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... long left school when his creative literary instincts began to assert themselves. His apprenticeship in literature may be said to have been served in the editing of an exceedingly clever family magazine, called The Earlsmead Chronicle, which circulated in the family ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... had a tremendously competent and creative mind. As a personality in civilization, he'd evidently slipped several cogs. Ridgely says that ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... grotto. I know nothing more common to poets than a pride in what belongs to their houses; and perhaps to a man not ill-natured, there are few things more pleasant than indulging the little weaknesses of those we admire. We sat down in a small temple made entirely of shells; and whether it was that the Creative Genius gave an undue charm to the place, I know not: but as the murmur of a rill, glassy as the Blandusian fountain, was caught, and re-given from side to side by a perpetual echo, and through an arcade of trees, whose leaves, ever and anon, fell startingly to the ground beneath the light touch ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... would have some creative and wonderful effect on her body. Not for years had she felt so full of youth and courage. She wanted to leap and run, to cry out, to find some other lonely human and embrace him. On the brick sidewalk before ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... nature, so it is with those offsprings of man's mind by which he has added permanently one more great feature to the world, and created a new power which is to act on mankind to the end. The mystery of the inventive and creative faculty, the subtle and incalculable combinations by which it was led to its work, and carried through it, are out of reach of investigating thought. Often the idea recurs of the precariousness of the result; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... may seem ridiculous. Perhaps it was. I was in good health, not very old—except in my feelings—and my stories, even the "Black Brig," had not been failures, by any means. But I am sure that every man or woman who writes, or paints, or does creative work of any kind, will understand and sympathize with me. I had "gone stale," that is the technical name for my disease, and to "go stale" is no joke. If you doubt it ask the writer or painter of your acquaintance. Ask him if he ever has felt that he could write or paint no more, and then ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... when a creative spirit cannot forget the adversaries which on all sides oppose him in the world: they come unsummoned to the room and will not be expelled; they peer over the shoulder, and tug at the hand which fain would write; they turn images upside down, and distort the thoughts; and here and there, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... death of Ibsen and Strindberg, Hamsun is undoubtedly the foremost creative writer of the Scandinavian countries. Those approaching most nearly to his position are probably Selma Lagerloef in Sweden and Henrik Pontoppidan in Denmark. Both these, however, seem to have less than he of that width of outlook, validity of interpretation ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... principles to smuggle into matter a 'potency and promise' of all 'life.' Huxley cannot play fast and loose with human volition, nor juggle the trustiness of memory into a state of consciousness, to save his system; nor may Haeckel lead us at his own sweet creative will through fourteen stages of vertebrate and eight of invertebrate life up to the great imaginary 'monera,' the father and mother of us all. It will be time to believe a million things in a lump ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... universe where so much had been made without discernible reference to Man, what became of that elaborate scheme of salvation which seemed to rest upon the assumption that the career of Humanity was the sole object of God's creative forethought and fostering care? When we bear this in mind, we see how natural and inevitable it was that the Church should persecute such men as Galileo and Bruno. At the same time it is instructive to observe that, while the Copernican astronomy has become ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... Abbey it has a certain dependence on something else: the extravagances of Marianne satirise the Sensibility-novel just as those of Catherine do the Terror-story of the immediate past. But it is on a much larger scale: and things of the kind are better in miniature. Moreover, the author's sense of creative faculty made her try to throw up and contrast her heroine with other characters, in a way which she had not attempted in Northanger Abbey: and good as these are in themselves, they make a less perfect whole. Indeed, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... the magazine over to hands that trembled as they took it. His education was in ultra-literary creative writing, his experience in war. And here, where there was the whole task of rebuilding a planet to be done, the ruin of tools and power made what could be done too little for even the few who were left. There was no grain to reap or wood to cut after ...
— Victory • Lester del Rey
... between Eugene and Aristide, did not appear to belong to the family. He was one of those frequent cases which give the lie to the laws of heredity. During the evolution of a race nature often produces some one being whose every element she derives from her own creative powers. Nothing in the moral or physical constitution of Pascal recalled the Rougons. Tall, with a grave and gentle face, he had an uprightness of mind, a love of study, a retiring modesty which contrasted strangely with the feverish ambitions ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... drama is almost obliterated; and it proves that Leonardo, when he chose, could withdraw himself from the delight of hand-to-mouth experience into a vision of his own, that he had the reserve and the creative power of the earlier masters and of that austere, laborious youth who taunted him. If it were not for "The Last Supper" we might doubt whether he could go further in art than the vivid sketch of "The Magi"; but "The ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... relative roles of the copyright owner and the transmitting organization in the copyrighted work and the service made available to the public with respect to relative creative contribution, technological contribution, capital ...
— Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code, Circular 92 • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.
... perish sometimes from sheer untalked talk. For lack of a creative listener they gradually fill up with unexpressed emotion. Presently this emotion begins to ferment, and finally—bang!—they blow up, burst, disappear in thin air. In all that community I suppose there was no one but the little faded wife to whom the minister dared open his heart, ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... a sound-wave advancing triumphantly to greet the sun as his roseate rim became visible over the forest like the rim of a cup that, filled with the essence of life, was about to empty its contents upon the earth, and to pour a bounteous flood of creative puissance upon the marshes whence a reddish vapour as of incense was arising. Meanwhile on the more precipitous of the two banks some of the trees near the river's margin were throwing soft green shadows over the water, while gilt-like dew was sparkling ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... possible the author should be free from distracting cares. The novelist does his best work when abstracted from the actual world and living in its ideal counterpart which for the time he is imagining. When his creative work is completed, he should live very close to the real world, or else he will be imagining a state of things which neither God nor man had any ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... Roman—of whom all, except the Hebrew, have at one time or another been its masters. So much coming and going of peoples corrupted the old Mizraimic faith. The Valley of Palms became a Valley of Gods. The Supreme One was divided into eight, each personating a creative principle in nature, with Ammon-Re at the head. Then Isis and Osiris, and their circle, representing water, fire, air, and other forces, were invented. Still the multiplication went on until we had another order, suggested ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... intellect, the imagination, the spirit, and even the heart, might all find their congenial aliment in pursuits which, as some of their ardent votaries believed, would ascend from one step of powerful intelligence to another, until the philosopher should lay his hand on the secret of creative force, and perhaps make new worlds for himself. We know not whether Aylmer possessed this degree of faith in man's ultimate control over nature. He had devoted himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific studies, ever to be weaned from them by any second passion. His ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... he went. I stood behind and enjoyed. Rapid creative sketching in chalk and charcoal. Then a chaos of colors and clouds, put on now with brushes, now with fingers. "God began with chaos," said he, quoting Prudhon. "We cannot expect ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that thou doest: thy heart realizes all its wishes; shouldest thou wish to make it day during the night, it is so forthwith.... If thou sayest to the water, 'Come from the rock,' it will come in a torrent suddenly at the words of thy mouth. The god Ra is like thee in his limbs, the god Khepra in creative force. Truly thou art the living image of thy father, Tum.... All thy words are accomplished daily." Some of the kings set up their statues in the temples by the side of the greatest of the national deities, to be the objects of ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... ruled the minds of the people, for these political events were like hurricanes or the changes of season, mere phenomena of a natural or physical order which never affected the spiritual integrity of Hindu culture. If after a passivity of some centuries India is again going to become creative it is mainly on account of this fundamental unity of her progress and civilisation and not for anything that she may borrow from other countries. It is therefore indispensably necessary for all those who wish to appreciate the significance and potentialities of Indian culture that ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... difficult to obtain the requisite knowledge of the human voice, and to study the scores of Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti with a special regard to this? Do our vocal composers make too great a sacrifice to their creative genius in making a study of those things which are essential? You consider it mortifying to inquire of those who understand singing, and you are sensitive about any disturbance of your vain over-estimate of your own powers; but you are not ashamed to cause the destruction of man's ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... we say that in like manner the baby should be left at liberty spiritually, because creative Nature can also fashion its spirit better than we can, we do not mean that it ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... engineers, leading scientists, and highly effective technical managers) are directly analogous to an estimated 50 to 500 men in all of the first three periods. Thus about 100 times the effort in terms of qualitative (effective, creative, patent-producing) manpower is being spent on the fourth revolution as on the ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... education connected with the several Southern States and managed by white trustees exclusively. What has been the history of the local academies and schools transferred to the Negro trustees and teachers not many years after the Civil War? What of those operated in later years as a monument to the creative genius of the Negro? For the most part, they remind us that they have seen better days. They speak a mighty truth which should be borne in mind by every class of inquirers on this subject. Self-help and worthy ambitions are commendable, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... countrymen, but, through the scientific publications of the day, with the whole world. What Ruskin said of the old ship of the line is still more true of the modern battleship: no higher exhibition of man's creative faculties is probably anywhere to be found. In view, therefore, of its genesis, and of the practical results of yearly cruisings, the battleship in its service of peace is entitled to the confidence we give to the work of competent men in all departments; nor should that confidence ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... profession. Spohr remained under the care of Dufour until he was twelve years old, and devoted himself to his work with great sedulity. Though he as yet knew but little of counterpoint and composition, his creative talent already began to assert itself, and he produced several duos and trios, as well as solo compositions, which evinced great promise, though crude and faulty in the extreme. He was then sent to Brunswick, ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... stand ready to fill up any gap which may occur in the present prevailing vegetation; and should the grasses disappear, animal life would not necessarily be destroyed, because a reserve supply, equivalent to a fresh act of creative power, has been provided. ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... of mutual-aid institutions which were developed by the creative genius of the savage and half-savage masses, during the earliest clan-period of mankind and still more during the next village-community period, and the immense influence which these early institutions have exercised upon the subsequent development of mankind, down to the present times, induced ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... gingerly. It was rather incomprehensible to her that anybody should care so much whether a black silk skirt was creased or not, when the terrible undertone of emotions which underline the world, and are its creative motive, were in existence, but Maria was learning gradually to be patient with the small worries of others which seemed large to them, and upon which she herself could not place much stress. She stood at the window, when her aunt ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... become better known as the queen of "Little Trianon" than as a queen of Versailles. At the former place she gave full license to her creative bent. Her palace, as well as her environments, she fashioned according to her own ideas, which were not French and only made her stand out the more conspicuously as a foreigner. From this sort of fairy creation arose the distinctively Marie Antoinette ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... adding to our spiritual stature, unfolding the new nature within us, it is a mistake to keep twitching at the petals with our coarse fingers. We must seek to let the Creative Hand alone. "It is God which giveth the increase." Natural Law, Growth, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... Bishop Butler when we think of moral character. Butler is an author who has drawn no characters of his own. Butler's genius was not creative like Shakespeare's or Bunyan's. Butler had not that splendid imagination which those two masters in character-painting possessed, but he had very great gifts of his own, and he has done us very great ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... I am wrapt in utter gloom; How far is night advanced, and when will day Retinge the dusk and livid air with bloom, And fill this void with warm, creative ray? Would I could sleep again till, clear and red, Morning shall on the ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... feeling of exciting and not unpleasing perplexity, to the orator; for he was an orator, though then unrecognised, and known only in his district. He was a pale and slender man, with a fine brow and an eye that occasionally flashed with the fire of a creative mind. His voice certainly was not like Hollaballoo's. It was rather thin, but singularly clear. There was nothing clearer except his meaning. Endymion never heard a case stated with such pellucid art; facts marshalled with such vivid simplicity, and ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... had gone abroad by this time. All London knew of the strange disappearance of the body of Sir Charles Darryll. Of course the wildest rumours were afloat, the cheaper newspapers had details that had been evolved from the brilliant imagination of creative reporters; a score of them had already besieged the manager of the Royal Palace Hotel and were making his life a burden to him. The thing was bad enough as it stood; enough damage had been done to the prestige of the hotel without making ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... Joined in the breast of God, feel deep the power That urges all things onward, not to an end, But in an endless flow, mounting and mounting, Claiming not overmuch for human life, Sharing with our brothers of nerve and leaf The urgence of the one creative breath,— All in the dim twilight—say of morning, Where the florescence of the light and dew Haloes and hallows with a crown adorning The brows of life with love; herein the clue, The love of life—yea, and the peerless love Of things not seen, that leads the least of things To cherish ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... life to novel. She can hold up her head and take her own part amidst all the Rosalinds, Beatrices, and Lucys that genius has created and memory can muster. But how she came into existence puzzles us not a little. Was she summoned out of nothingness by the creative fancy of Lavengro, or did he really first set eyes upon her in the dingle whither she came with the Flaming Tinman, whose look Lavengro did not like at all? Reality and romance, though Borrow made them wear double harness, are not meant ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... good friend, liberalism is the same thing in both countries, though its work and tactics may be different. It is destructive but not creative. It tampers with the checks and balances of our constitution. It flatters the people by removing the restraints they so wisely placed on themselves to curb their own impetuosity. It has shaken the stability of the judiciary by making the ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... by making them their own; and the most poetic expression which appears in the imagery of an author brings forth still more ethereal imagery in the mind of a reader. To read is to join with the writer in a creative act. The mystery of the transubstantiation of ideas, originates perhaps in the instinctive consciousness that we have of a vocation loftier than our present destiny. Or, is it based on the lost tradition of a former life? ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... by a house on fire; once by having to pay for an unstamped letter, and once by getting people to look through a telescope at a comet that might destroy the world. He thought his detective brain as good as the criminal's, which was true. But he fully realised the disadvantage. "The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic," he said with a sour smile, and lifted his coffee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... people because they seem like real people and because they are actuated by motives which one is able to understand. Saturday's Child is Mrs. Norris' longest work. Into it has gone the very best of her creative talent. It is a volume which the many admirers of Mother will ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... the simple truth is that we are all—every last man of us—paupers in everything. We haven't a thing we haven't got from some one else. We are beneficiaries to the last degree, dependent on the bounty of Another. We are paupers in life itself. Our life came to us in the first instance from the creative Hand, through the action of others, and it is being sustained every moment by the same Hand. We had nothing to do with its coming, and, while we influence our life by living in accord with certain physical laws, still the life itself is all the time being supplied to us directly by the ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... of man. When the spirit by sanctification is fitted for an incorruptible body, then shall it be raised into a world of incorruption, and a celestial body shall burgeon forth thereto, the germ of which had been implanted by the redeeming and creative Word in this world. Truly hath it been said of the elect:—They fall asleep in earth, but awake in heaven. So St. Paul expressly teaches: and as the passage (1. 'Cor'. xv. 35—54,) was written for the express purpose of rectifying the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... creative than this? Had the worlds dedicated themselves to the same monotonous pattern? He had caught a glimpse of conventional, rocket-shaped spaceships, plying their courses back and forth among the planets. He saw boats and cars and a few long-nosed airplanes, ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... race. Gold cannot indemnify for the loss of the swarming young life which we were obliged to mourn even after ten weeks of war; and if, amid ten thousand of the fine fellows who died, there was even a single creative mind, then thousands of millions could not ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... have to admit that I don't give much of a damn for politics or manners. And yet, with all my ardor I was quickly subdued by a curt rebuke by my interlocutors (for Zimri was there as well), which was, quite simply, that you hadn't taken Homer for any more than a creative poet, even after a few thousand years of study, so why should my meager manuscript make such a large impact. At that, I acquiesced to them and admitted that on that end my attempt to save humanity one way or another was contemptible, but I still write, as ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... always lain chiefly in the perfecting of his tools. From the beginning he has had certain ideas, certain tendencies, a certain consciousness of things to express; he has been haunted, as only creative artists are haunted, by a world waiting to be born; and, from the beginning, he has built on a basis of criticism, a criticism of life. Part of his strength has gone out in fighting: he has had the sense of a mission. Part of his strength has gone out in the attempt to ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... and unnoticeable causes, aided or retarded by the slow effects of elevation or depression from the earth's shrinkage towards its own centre. Geology, in short, has shown us that the world is what it is, not by virtue of a single sudden creative act, nor by virtue of successive terrible and recurrent cataclysms, but by virtue of the slow continuous action of causes still ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... agreed that a recumbent or semi-recumbent position is the best for creative thought, and another friend of mine, also a maker of verses, has patented the very ingenious device of a pair of stirrups just under the mantelshelf, so that, when he sits back in his armchair, he can manage his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... whom Nature's self design'd To trace the labyrinths of the human mind— To read the heart, and give with strong control, To stone the silent workings of the soul: Thine all-creative hand, thy matchless skill Could what unbounded genius plann'd, fulfil. Hence sprang that grief-wrung form—the languid eye— The bloodless lip, and look of agony— That face, where mute contending passions play— That life of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... his own life with his own creation, and it was his lonely yearning that stirred her pulseless heart. Little did he think, toiling at that stupendous figure, ages gone by, that he transfused into the stone at which he labored, like a patient ant at some stupendous burden, no little share of that creative yearning that inspired him to his task; as little as you think, dear poet, whether poet, painter, or sculptor,—for all are one, and one is all,—that in those dreams which you write, as unconscious of your power as the transcribing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... was still less purchasable than the soul of a slave. A growing feeling of humanity was stirring through the northern States. It was not the work, I think, of any man or body of men; it was rather itself a creative force, and made men and bodies of men the results of its awakening influence. To such a power, my father's nature was quickly responsive. Both his head and his heart recognized the terrible wrongs of ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... arms, and the fountain of love thus break forth at once from their encountering hearts, his soul leaped for joy of the new-created love—new, but not the less surely eternal; for God is Love, and Love is that which is, and was, and shall be for evermore—boundless, unconditioned, self-existent, creative! "Truly," he said in himself, "God is Love, and God is all and in all! He is no abstraction; he is the one eternal Individual God! In him Love evermore breaks forth anew into fresh personality—in every ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... temple no longer is open to scenes and faces of loveliness. What a fearful loss is this loss of sight—on the whole the noblest of the senses, and certainly the sense of all others most serviceable, alike to the working hand and the creative imagination. The eye may not be so near the fountains of sensibility as the ear, and no impression reaches the sympathy so profoundly as the pathos of living speech, but the eye has a far wider range than the ear and fathoms the heavens and sweeps the earth and sea, whilst ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... influences of the sexual life of the child cannot here be fully discussed. But when we see that in great poets and other artists much of their creative work may be effected in childhood, and when, on the other hand, we observe the connexion of many artistic productions with the psychosexual sphere, we cannot fail to admit the possibility that the sexual life of the child is to some extent related to art. Thus, we sometimes see children endeavouring, ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... Wolf Hunt, in the collection of Lord Ashburton, was one of the earliest, painted in 1612 for the Spanish General Legranes only three years after Rubens's return from Italy. In this picture, his bold creative fancy and dramatic turn of mind are remarkably conspicuous—even at this early stage in his career. Catherine Brant, his first wife, on a brown horse, with a falcon in her hand, is near her husband; ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... no imitation; originality; creativeness. invention, creation. Adj. unimitated[obs3], uncopied[obs3]; unmatched, unparalleled; inimitable &c. 13; unique, original; creative, inventive, untranslated; exceptional, rare, sui generis ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... trivial bagatelle compared to the shadowy projections, umbras and penumbras, which the unsearchable depths of man's nature is capable, under adequate excitement, of throwing off, and even into stationary forms. I shall have occasion to notice this point again. There are creative agencies in every part of human nature, of which the thousandth part could never be revealed in ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... broad-shouldered, alert—the Norman was a Frenchman only. But no other part of Gaul then did what Normandy did: nor could any other French province show, as Normandy showed, immediate, organized and creative power, during the few years that ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... doubt and fear, timidity and lack of confidence, this means that your mental inhibitions are too numerous, too high or too strong. Remove them and access is had to the latent energy of accumulated and creative thought complexes. You will then become buoyant, cheerful, overflowing with enthusiasm, and ready for a fresh, definite, active part ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton
... below his real merits. And at this moment there is no celebrated poet, perhaps no writer, in regard to whom the final judgment of critics and men of letters is so imperfectly determined. Here is a man whom Goethe accounted a character of unique eminence, with supreme creative power, whose poetry, he admitted, had influenced his own later verse—one of those who gave strenuous impulse to the romantic movement throughout England, France, and Germany in the first quarter of this century, who set the fashion of his day in England, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... sort, as a weapon, a utensil, an article of costume, and if the natural objects represented or suggested are used only as suggestions to furnish pretty lines and pleasant tints, which lines and tints might have been after all represented apart from the object were man's mind more creative than it is,—that ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... suddenly unfolded to her and had brushed off the ether-dust of harmless and joyful peace from her childish soul. The happy child had become a conscious maiden, and new thoughts, new feelings had sprung up within her. The first tears of sorrow had, with a mighty creative power, called all these slumbering blossoms of her heart into existence and activity, and her unconscious ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... States and Hungary we discover many common traits: the same state-creative energy in the predominant people, which finds expression in constitutional forms, relying upon the love of freedom, which unites so many different races in one uniform whole; the same independent institutions; the same ideas in religion, in ethics; the same respect for women, the same esteem of ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... desert into paradise to enter their house (one of the popular villas), knowing that I would invariably find a welcome in this happy family circle. Not only was my spirit soothed and benefited by intercourse with my sister, but my creative instincts, which had long lain dormant, were stimulated afresh by the society of my brilliant and learned brother-in-law. It was brought home to me, without in any way hurting my feelings, that my early marriage, excusable as it ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... spending the greater part of the day in complete idleness, and I was told that was intellectual work. My activity in the scholastic and official sphere had required neither mental application nor talent, nor special qualifications, nor creative impulse; it was mechanical. Such intellectual work I put on a lower level than physical toil; I despise it, and I don't think that for one moment it could serve as a justification for an idle, careless life, as it is indeed nothing but a sham, one of the forms of that same idleness. Real intellectual ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... to ocean construed to him as she could construe it, would not the great man become plastic under her hands? And if, while this was a-doing, Felix would run away with Marie, could not forgiveness be made easy? And her creative mind ranged still farther. Mr Broune might help, and even Mr Booker. To such a one as Melmotte, a man doing great things through the force of the confidence placed in him by the world at large, the freely-spoken support of the Press would be everything. Who would not buy shares ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... last days Artois had not been to the island, nor had he seen the Marchesino. A sudden passion for work had seized him. Since the night of Vere's meeting with Peppina his brain had been in flood with thoughts. Life often acts subtly upon the creative artist, repressing or encouraging his instinct to bring forth, depressing or exciting him when, perhaps, he expects it least. The passing incidents of life frequently have their hidden, their unsuspected part in determining ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... The victory was so much the more glorious in that it was gained over an army superior in numbers and almost equal in quality. It was owing to the king's valor, decision, vigilance, quick eye, comprehension of tactics, and that creative instinct which he brought into application in politics as well as in war, and which was destined to render him so happily inspired in the beautiful defensive actions of Arques, at the affair of Ivry, and on so many other occasions." [Histoire des Princes de Conde, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... in all lines of work that do not require imagination or the creative faculties, and as business men, lawyers, doctors, scientists, they do extremely well, and are generally to ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... senses and imagination, are wholesome and necessary to the cultivation and preservation of the religious sentiment in some minds. Catholicism was the faith of the chivalrous times, of the poetical times, of times when the creative faculty of man poured forth in since unknown abundance masterpieces of every kind of beauty, as manifestations of the pious and devout enthusiasm. Protestantism is undoubtedly the faith of these times; ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... public eye. As a basis for belief of any kind, his vision is of no more value than that of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who would probably in that region discern the promise and potency of every form of life in a supreme and creative intelligence. Scientific men are continually pushing back the limits of our knowledge of the material universe. They have during the last eighty years made an enormous addition to the sum of that knowledge, but they have not, since Democritus, taken away one hair's-breadth ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... sense of the situation, and again his eyes sought the upright coffin, now illuminated by the moon for half its length. He saw the gleam of the metallic plate and tried without moving to decipher the inscription. Then he fell to speculating upon what was behind it. His creative imagination presented him a vivid picture. The planks no longer seemed an obstacle to his vision and he saw the livid corpse of the dead woman, standing in grave-clothes, and staring vacantly at him, with lidless, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... necessary for spoiling a timepiece to break its every bearing; one loose screw stops all the wheels. Thus a very slight error as to the management of the bodily mechanism is sufficient to prevent fine creative work as author, speaker, or inventor. Few men, perhaps, ever learn how to so manage their brain and stomach as to be capable of high-pressure brain action for days at a time—until the cumulative mental forces ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... can make another capable of rule, clearly can teach him how to play the master; and if can make him play the master, he can make him what is grander still, a kingly being. [4] Once more, therefore, I protest: A man possessed of such creative power is worthy, not of ridicule, far from it, ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... a spirit, or invisible man or animal, of ethereal substance, the counterpart of the visible body, within which it resides, and to which it imparts life, strength, and the power of assimilating food.[261:2] Archaeus was regarded as the creative spirit, which, working upon the raw material of water or fluidity, by means of a ferment promotes the various actions which result in the development and nutrition of the physical organism. As life ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... single focus of resisting stubborn will. And I turned my sight from the Shadow; above all, from those strange serpent eyes,—eyes that had now become distinctly visible. For there, though in nought else around me, I was aware that there was a WILL, and a will of intense, creative, working evil, which might ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... instead of being copied, has been trifled with and birds and animals show peculiarities unknown to science and which go far to prove that the Mound-Builders, however else endowed, possessed lively imaginations and no little creative fancy. ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... subject, as we have seen over and over again, is so highly charged with the artist's mood, with his individual feelings and emotions, that it becomes unrecognisable as mere illustration, and the work passes by virtue of sheer inspiration into the higher realms of creative art. Such fusion of personality and subject is the characteristic of lyrical art, and in this domain Giorgione is a supreme master. His genius, as Morelli rightly pointed out, is essentially lyrical in contradistinction to Titian's, which is essentially dramatic. Take ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... the application of the self-denying hymn, that man wants but little here below, and wants that little long; but this may be only a passing sigh of the period. We are far from expressing any preference for tall women over short women. There are creative moods of the fancy when each seems the better. We can only ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... before. I thrilled with the joy of the constructor, the builder, even in this humble capacity. I felt superior to those for whom I was building. In a coarse way I suppose it was a reflection of some artistic sense—something akin to the creative impulse. I can say truthfully that at the end of that first day I came home—begrimed and sore as I was—with a sense of fuller life than so far I ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton |
