I love collecting quotes, a wise word can really touch the soul and invite reflection on an area of your life where you may need a little illumination. Here are some of my favourites, quotes about creativity, wisdom, compassion and life!
Here’s an idea!
Pick a number at random from 1 – 115 and see which one you have picked, how does it relate to you at this point in your life?
1. “Without inspiration the best powers of the mind remain dormant, there is fuel in us which needs to be ignited with sparks”
Johann Gottfried Von Herder
2. “You are seen, you are known, you are loved”
Sark
3. “Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.”
A. A. Milne (Eeyore, from Winnie the Pooh)
4. “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.”
Maya Angelou
5. “Let the beauty we love be what we do”
Rumi
6. “I paint my own reality”
Frida Kahlo
7. “There is no greater insight into the future than recognising when we save our children, we save ourselves.”
Margaret Mead
8. “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those that mind don’t matter and those that matter don’t mind.”
Dr Seuss
9. “For my part know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream”
Vincent Van Gogh
10. “When I die, I can think I go where all those who were daring go”
Vincent Van Gogh
11. “A child in the cradle if you watch it at leisure, has the infinite in its eyes”
Vincent Van Gogh
12. “Just as we take a train… we take death to reach a star. Death holds no terror for me.”
Vincent Van Gogh
13. “The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for staying ashore.”
Vincent Van Gogh
14. “To understand everything is to forgive everything”
Vincent Van Gogh
15. “I’ll always see through my own eyes and tackle things originally
Vincent Van Gogh
16. “Find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful, poetry surrounds us everywhere
Vincent Van Gogh
17. “It’s not good to know one thing, it stultifies you, one shouldn’t rest until one also knows the opposite”
Vincent Van Gogh
18. “The way is long if one follows precepts, but short if one follows patterns”
Seneca
19. “Happiness is not something ready made, it comes from following actions”
The Dalai Lama
20. “Live the life you have imagined”
Henry David Thoreau
21. “Take the first step. You don’t have to see the whole staircase just take the next step”
Martin Luther King
22. “The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude”
Nietzsche
23. “The opposite of play is not work, it is depression”
Brian Sutton Smith
24. “No fate is worse than a life without love
Mexican Proverb
25. “Celebrate what you want to see more of
Tom Peters
26. “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are
Anais Nin
27. “One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries”
A.A. Milne
28. “Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight; always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?”
Sir James M. Barrie
29. “One day our ancestors will think it is incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.”
Franklin Thomas
30. “There is nothing as dark as night
But nothing so strong as light
Here is the choice
To let it burn out or bright
In a world where the fear or force
Have buried the silent source
Can you deny the need
For a light like yours?”
Christine Kane
31. “…with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things”
William Wordsworth
32. “Desire is half of life, indifference is half of death”
Kahlil Gibran
33. “Ring the bell that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There’s a crack in everything
That’s what lets the light get in”
Leonard Cohen
34. “Surely the greatest work of art any of us can ever create is our own soul. In the slow delicate layering, there are necessary places of waiting, incubation and integration.”
Sue Monk Kidd
35. “To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong”
Joseph Chiltern Pearce
36. “Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy”
Marcel Proust
37. “One can’t believe impossible things’ Alice said, “I dare say you haven’t had much practice” said the Queen, “When I was your age I always did it for half an hour every day. Why sometimes I’ve believed in as many as six impossible things before breakfast”.
Lewis Caroll
38. “Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go”
Louise Driscoll
39. “Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth”
Pema Chodron
40. “To be fully alive, fully human and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest”
Pema Chodron
41. “Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear?”
Pema Chodron
42. “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognise our shared humanity.”
Pema Chodron
43. “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.”
Martha Graham
44. “Not all who wander are lost
J.R.R. Tolkien
45. “No act of kindness however small is ever wasted.”
Aesop
46. “Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen”
Robert Bresson
47. “Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess we may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”
Agnes de Mille
48. “In ordinary life creativity means making something for the soul out of everyday experience.”
Thomas Moore
49. “Creativity is an act of love, an act of connection and sharing. Creativity requires risk just as loving does.”
Julia Cameron
50. “It may be that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey”
Wendall Berry
51. “Great things are done by a series of small things put together”
Vincent Van Gogh
52. “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves.”
C. G. Jung
53. “We cannot live in a world that is interpreted by others. An interpreted world is not a hope, part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.”
Hildegarde Von Bingen
54. “Do not ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go out and do it. Because the world needs more people who have come alive.”
Howard Thomas
55. “ Be careful how you interpret the world, it is like that.”
Erich Heller
56. “Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure.”
Maria Rainer Rilke
57. “It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to the imagination.”
Henry David Thoreau
58. “ We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.”
Albert Einstein
59. “Nature does nothing uselessly.”
Aristotle
60. “Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them more.”
Oscar Wilde
61. “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
Oscar Wilde
62. “Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.”
Bob Dylan
63. “Creativity is a learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.”
Arthur Koestler
64. “…you have so many extraordinary gifts; how can you expect to life an ordinary life… go and embrace your liberty, and see what wonderful things come of it”
Louisa M Alcott (Marmee talking to Jo in Little Women)
65. “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”
Jimi Hendrix
65. “If there is light in the soul. there will be beauty in the person,
If there is beauty in the person there will be harmony in the house,
If there is harmony in the house, there will be order in the nation,
If there is order in the nation there will be peace in the world.
Chinese proverb
67. “Life shrinks or expands according to your courage.”
Anais Nin
68. “I’ve had such a wonderful life, I just wish I’d known it sooner.”
Colette
69. “You yourself as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.”
Buddha
70. “The greater the tension, the greater is the potential. Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.”
C. G. Jung
71. “Oh I’m scared all the time. I just act as if I’m not.”
Katherine Hepburn
72. “I, an artist… I am here to life out loud”
Emile Zola
73. “What is done in love is done well”
Vincent Van Gogh
74. “On with the dance, let joy be unconfined.”
Lord Byron
75. “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
76. “Promise me you’ll always remember you’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
A. A. Milne
77. “May your heart always be joyful. May your song always be sung”
Bob Dylan
78. “The personal life deeply lived expands into something beyond itself.”
Anais Nin
79. “Your life should reach others. Your blissfulness. your ecstasy should not be contained within you like a seed. It should open like a flower and spread its fragrance to all and sundry.”
Osho
80. “Even though the world changes like cloud formations, all that is fulfilled returns home to the changeless one.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
81. “Creativity is contagious, pass it on”
Albert Einstein
82. “May the long time sun shine upon you
All love surround you
And the pure light within you
Guide your way home.”
Celtic Blessing
83.”Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”
Maya Angelou
84. “We must slow down to a human tempo and we’ll bin to have time to listen.”
Thomas Merton
85. “The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot.”
Flannery O’Connor
86. “Creativity comes from looking for the
unexpected and stepping outside your
own experience.”
Masaru Ibuka
87. “Like the daily cycle of night and day, the monthly cycles of the moon, the yearly cycles of the seasons, and the life-long cycle of birth, death and re-birth, our creativity and destructivity comes and goes in cycles.”
Roseanne Bane
88. “Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.”
Kahlil Gibran
89. “Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
Rumi
90. “Without a shadow even the self is not real. It always has two opposites, a bright and a dark.”
C.G.Jung
91. “You have brains in your head
You have feet in your shoes
You can steer yourself,
Any direction you choose.”
Dr Seuss
92. “You are you.Now isn’t that pleasant?”
Dr. Seuss
93. “You have to be brave with your liee so that others can be brave with theirs.”
Katherine Center
94. “God respects us when we work but loves us when we dance.”
Sufi saying
95. “To have an intimate connection with the world is to know about it’s passing.”
Natalie Goldberg
96. “If you engage in travel,you will arrive.”
Arabi
97. “Always concentrate on how far you’ve come, rather than how far you have left to go.”
Unknown
98. ” Valuing our experience is not narcissism. It is not endless self involvement. It is rather, the act of paying active witness to ourselves and to our world.Such witness is an act of dignity, an act that recognises that life is essentially a sacred transaction of which we know only the shadow, not the shape. As we attune ourselves more and more closely to the value of passing moments, we learn that we are something of moment ourselves.”
Julia Cameron
99. ” Keep on starting and finishing will take care of itself.”
Neil Fiore
100. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
Maya Angelou
101. ” It is a great paradox that the more personal, focused and specific your writing becomes, the more universally it communicates.”
Julia Cameron
102. “Shoot for the moon.Even if you miss you will land among the stars.”
Les Brown
103. “One does not discover new land withut consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”
Andre Gide
104. “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did,but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Maya Angelou
105. “But one day, all those small but indelible moments of private courage will burst through and both you and your world will have changed”
Sarah Ban Breathnach
106. “If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign that you’re not doing anything very innovative.”
Woody Allen
107. ” If cleanliness is next to godliness, then messiness is next to godessness.
John Boe
108. “Each day, each life is a series of choices.”
Julia Cameron
109. “In a sense, our creativity is none of our business. It is a given, not something to be aspired to. It is not an invention of our ego. It is, instead, a natural function of our soul.”
Julia Cameron
110. “Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are. When you realise nothing is lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”
Lau Tzu
111. “Imagination has always had powers of resurrection that no science can match.”
Ingrid Bengis
112. “If he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.”
C.G.Jung
113. “The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.”
Shelley
114. “It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.”
May Sarton
115. ” I have no special talents. I am just passionately curious.”
Albert Einstein