47 Words of Wisdom to Inspire Your Creative Heart

This week’s post is a hefty dose of inspiration for creatives. I organized these quotes in a specific way so they read more like an essay on creativity and living the artistic life. And less like a collection of individual nuggets of wisdom, each to be reflected on separately. You can also scroll to the bottom where I wrote it out into paragraphs.

Confession time: I am NOT a designer. I’m just a writer who loves design and still has a lot to learn, whose guilty pleasure is inspirational quotes (among other things) and who loves to play with words. The way they look, the way they’re arranged, the way they make us feel. Enjoy!

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little. I love words in all their thought-provoking glorious irreverence; I love the firework of ideas they spark in my brain. After all, there is no great agony than bearing an untold story inside you. So dream more, write more, feel more. I’ve learned people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it. Therefore, use what talents you possess: the woods would be silent if no birds sang except those that sang best. Be yourself; everyone else is already taken. You alone are enough, you have nothing to prove to anybody. Be shocking, be bold, be daring, be passionate, be available, respond, follow up, engage, share knowledge freely. Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality. Find something you’re passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it. You can never be great at anything unless you love it.

Everything you can imagine is real. Creativity is intelligence having fun. Creativity is the process of original ideas that have value, it’s a process, it’s not random.

Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. We wait, starving for moments of high magic to inspire us, but life is full of common enchantment waiting for our alchemist’s eyes to notice. The idea is just the beginning. Your world is a living expression of how you are using and have used your mind. Whatever we plant in our subconscious and nurture with repetition and emotion will one day become a reality.

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning. And the desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul. Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun. An essential aspect of creativity if not being afraid to fail.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. If you hear a voice within you say, “You cannot paint” by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. Vision without execution, though, is just a hallucination. The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up. I don’t need an alarm clock, my ideas wake me.

It’s hard to fail, but it’s worse to never have tried to succeed. Success is simply going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. It may not be easy, but it will be worth it. Great things are done by a series of small things brought together. The harder I work the luckier I get. Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Stay humble. Hustle hard. It always seems impossible until it’s done. The worse mistake is not to make any. but what you get by achieving your goals is not as important as who you become by achieving your goals.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice…it’s conformity. Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. But the one thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change this world, are the ones who do.

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