“The creative personality is always one that looks on the world as fit for change and on himself as an instrument for change. Otherwise, what are you creating for? If the world is perfectly all right the way it is, you have no place in it. The creative personality thinks of the world as a canvas for change and of himself as a divine agent of change.”
Source: The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination
“...nothing is more dangerous than solitude: there our imagination, always disposed to rise, taking a new flight on the wings of fancy, pictures to us a chain of beings of whom we seem the most inferior. All things appear greater than they really are, and all seem superior to us. This operation of the mind is quite natural: we so continually feel our own imperfections, and fancy we perceive in others the qualities we do not possess, attributing to them also all that we enjoy ourselves, that by this process we form the idea of a perfect, happy man,—a man, however, who only exists in our own imagination.”
Source: The Sorrows of Young Werther
“They say using your imagination makes you live longer.”
Source: Highly Illogical Behavior
“I wish I could run into the world’s arms. Linger within the spaces between nothing. I wish I could filter out of existence. To live quietly without dying. I wish I could be cherished by life itself. To speak and sing volumes without lying to myself.”
Source: The Artist, The Audience, and a Man Called Nothing
“The strangest thing about demons is that they come to love you. As much as they try to murder the very core of you when you first meet, they become your closest companions. I never asked for this devil on my shoulder. But my eyes are burning and I’m not alone. If you see a red gaze at midheaven, look away. It’s exactly as they say: hell is a hungry place.”
“Artists, composers and writers...are bent upon capturing and reining in the insights of a fugitive imagination, always inclined to shoot off into the distance, before they can get away, and on bringing them back into the immediacy of material engagement. Like hunters, they too are dream-catchers.”
Source: Imagining Landscapes: Past, Present and Future
“All around us is a nothing that stretches on for infinity. We humans can barely comprehend that. If we comprehend it we are rarely pleased.”
Source: The Artist, The Audience, and a Man Called Nothing
“I keep dying and hoping you notice me. But you’re too busy living.”
Source: The Artist, The Audience, and a Man Called Nothing
“Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.”
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“...as I get older, I find myself insisting on my right to be philosophically sloppy.”
Source: Major Pettigrew's Last Stand