Creative Anxiety Quotes & Sayings

Error is the ultimate inside job. Yes, the world can be profoundly confusing; and yes, other people can mislead or deceive you. In the end, though, nobody but you can choose to believe your own beliefs. That's part of why recognizing our errors is such a strange experience: accustomed to disagreeing with other people, we suddenly find ourselves at odds with *ourselves*. — Kathryn Schulz

There were times when initial introductions were so vested with something other as to confuse and distract and entrance both parties, Cy would realize later. And only further into their relationships when you knew the person better, and their place in your life became clear, if there was love, if there was hate, if there was deepness of any kind, only then did you understand that the embers of meaning have been present all along and glowing since that first moment you laid eyes on them. As if you already knew them before you came to know them. As if some rift had bent time. — Sarah Hall

I think 'slow writing' is the answer when the feeling of burn out threatens, something akin to the 'slow food' movement. Anxiety and panic are counterproductive to the creative process. — Rosaleen Love

Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom. — Alice Walker

She had, in a few short words, utterly defiled, defamed and defaced the finely tuned social order that was the bedrock of the Collective. — Jasper Fforde

In positive terms, we can state that psychological maturity entails finding greater satisfaction in giving than in receiving; having a capacity to form satisfying and permanent loyalties; being primarily a creative, contributing person; having learned to profit from experience; having a freedom from fear (anxiety) with a resulting true serenity and not a pseudo absence of tension; and accepting and making the most of unchangeable reality when it confronts one. — William C. Menninger

If mindfulness is the cure to wayward thought, which can be responsible for a lot of the stress, depression and anxiety in society, then this mindfulness needs to be constant. — Brittany Hallison

The problem of life is to change worry into thinking and anxiety into creative action. — Harold Bridgwood Walker

Master Li turned bright red while he scorched the air with the Sixty Sequential Sacrileges with which he had won the all-China Freestyle Blasphemy Competition in Hangchow three years in a row. — Barry Hughart

What the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction ... Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one's own potentialities. — Rollo May

I do have commitment phobia, which I think is underlied by death anxiety. I feel that if you are in a relationship, there is a real genuine possibility of plateauing, and there is a possibility for a creative, emotional and spiritual death because of it. Only part of me feels this way, but it's enough to create an anxiety which makes me think twice before committing. — Alex Karpovsky

Having a mood disorder is not synonymous with having artistic talent, but it is true that people in the so-called creative professions-writers, actors, artists, musicians-have a higher than normal incidence of such illnesses, and there are also a disproportionate number of alcoholics in these fields whose drinking may be an attempt to medicate the anxiety of depression. — Tracy Thompson

We are always personally under an agitating pressure and cloud of anxiety. And Olmsted himself had grown increasingly susceptible to illness. He was sixty-eight years old and partly lame from a decades-old carriage accident that had left one leg an inch shorter than the other. He was prone to lengthy bouts of depression. His teeth hurt. He had chronic insomnia and facial neuralgia. A mysterious roaring in his ears at times made it difficult for him to attend to conversation. He was still full of creative steam, still constantly on the move, but overnight train journeys invariably laid him low. Even in his own bed his nights often became sleepless horrors laced with toothache. — Erik Larson

There is a multitude of forms of this appearing of un-freedom in the guise of its opposite: in being deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we are being given a new freedom of choice (to choose our healthcare provider); when we can no longer rely on long-term employment and are compelled to search for a new precarious job every couple of years, we are told that we are being given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and discover our creative potential; when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we are now able to become "entrepreneurs of the self," acting like a capitalist freely choosing how to invest the resources he possesses (or has borrowed). In education, health, travel we are constantly bombarded by imposed "free choices"; forced to make decisions for which we are mostly not qualified (or do not possess enough information), we increasingly experience our freedom as a burden that causes unbearable anxiety. — Slavoj Zizek

Confidence on the outside begins by living with integrity on the inside. — Brian Tracy

Zajonc was able to make people like any word or image more just by showing it to them several times.9 The brain tags familiar things as good things. Zajonc called this the "mere exposure effect," and it is a basic principle of advertising. — Jonathan Haidt

Dogmatism of all kinds
scientific, economic, moral, as well as political
are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76) — Rollo May

Creative people ... are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of 'divine madness,' to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. — Rollo May

I thought one should have the attitude of 'What do you care what other people think!' — Richard P. Feynman

But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi
like Christ whom Blake called an artist because he had one of the most creative imaginations that ever was on earth
do not want security, egoistic or materialistic. Why, it never occurs to them. "Be not anxious for the morrow," and "which of you being anxious can add one cubit to his stature?"
So they dare to be idle, i.e. not to be pressed and duty-driven all the time. They dare to love people even when they are very bad, and they dare not to try and dominate others to show them what they must do for their own good. — Brenda Ueland

I've had to keep defining and defending myself as a writer every single day of my adult life
constantly reminding and re-reminding my soul and the cosmos that I'm very serious about the business of creative living, and that I will never stop creating, no matter what the outcome, and no matter how deep my anxieties and insecurities may be. — Elizabeth Gilbert

In The Dynamics of Creation, Anthony Storr, the British psychiatrist, contends that an individual who "fears love almost as much as he fears hatred" may turn to creative activity not only out of an impulse to experience aesthetic pleasure, or the delight of exercising an active mind, but also to defend himself against anxiety stimulated by conflicting demands for detachment and human contact.21 — Sylvia Nasar

Fear is elemental to every human endeavour involving risk and change, which includes ALL creative endeavours. To be creative is to be anxious. To endure the anxiousness - to face it and work with it, to allow it to lay bare what has been hidden - is the beginning of faith, which, in a certain sense, is the courage to become, to become present, along with all the other characters, tribes and audiences whose actions move the unfolding drama that is the world. — Billy Marshall Stoneking

They say certain people aren't good soldiers because if they're in a foxhole all night - you know, if you're creative and smart, you're thinking about all the different ways someone is going to blow your head off. But if you're not that smart, you're just like chilling out. And I feel like that in life. I'm just in the foxhole all fucking day thinking about everything that's going to go wrong in every possible way. — Judd Apatow

An attraction to self-discovery and self-expression can be uplifting and assist us combat epic boredom. The toll of writing truthfully as possible can cause the writer to spiral emotionally out of control. Writing's tempest temperament can prove a fatal attraction and many notable writers succumbed to the dark knight's powerful sword. Too many writers and a cast of dead poets found themselves dangerously adrift on the flowing river of black ink interlocked in a life and death struggle with the creative streams of impulsion colliding with the rocky pods of madness. All artists must fight off the impulse to surrender to the aftershock of madness. The mad vein of stabbing pain that we might think belongs exclusively to ourselves is in actuality the capstone of the blood sport known as communal anxiety. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the "divine madness," to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean. — Rollo May

A person's industrious and creative mindset can overcome great obstacles that besiege their existence. Humankind's greatest unraveling is our propensity to panic when confronting the pealing silence of nothingness. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I hate wise men because they are lazy, cowardly, and prudent. To the philosophers' equanimity, which makes them indifferent to both pleasure and pain, I prefer devouring passions. The sage knows neither the tragedy of passion, nor the fear of death, nor risk and enthusiasm, nor barbaric, grotesque, or sublime heroism. He talks in proverbs and gives advice. He does not live, feel, desire, wait for anything. He levels down all the incongruities of life and then suffers the consequences. So much more complex is the man who suffers from limitless anxiety. The wise man's life is empty and sterile, for it is free from contradiction and despair. An existence full of irreconcilable contradictions is so much richer and creative. The wise man's resignation springs from inner void, not inner fire. I would rather die of fire than of void. — Emil Cioran

when humans are lost in space, it takes only five minutes to reach totalitarianism. — Liu Cixin

When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction. — Steven Wright

I have learned that the stuff that causes me anxiety, the stuff I instinctively veer away from, is usually a road map to where my own creative growth can be found. So I consciously head toward the places that make me uncomfortable. — Merrill Markoe

I also know that not everyone will like what I do, and that there are many people who do love my work, and so I write for them, and for my own pleasure, and try not to brood too much over those who have different tastes. And I have written enough books now that I know the self-doubt and the anxiety are part of the creative process, and drive me to keep trying to do better, and keep me from becoming too cocksure about my writing, which is a form of creative death. — Kate Forsyth

Developing our capacity for compassion makes it possible for us to help others in a more skillful and effective way. And compassion helps us as well. — Joan Halifax

Now you're gonna take beatings. It's written in our DNA, you know. You're gonna go down. You get up, it's that simple. — Travis Rice

Liberals and conservatives tend to view the economy in purely materialistic terms. They make growth, security, and prosperity ends in themselves. They exalt enlightened self-interest. They tell us that productive work is the fundamental source of human dignity.

But for Christians, (Greg) Forster insists, the materialistic view is a lie. The modern economic man is prone to workaholism, Envy, greed, anxiety, and a host of other ills. The great task for Christians is to become, broadly speaking, innovative entrepreneurs: people who are not only more productive in their work then there would be leaving neighbors, but also more creative, generous, honest, and humane. — Greg Forster

Soul-the spiritual principle, the creative spark of God-cannot work if you panic. Anxiety shuts down the creative centers. When you can't think, whatever you try to do becomes one blunder piled upon another. If you slow down, the spiritual principle can begin working through you so that you can figure out the solution to the problem that is bothering you. — Harold Klemp

The same sensitivity that opens artists to Being also makes them vulnerable to the dark powers of non-Being. It is no accident that many creative people
including Dante, Pascal, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beethoven, Rilke, Blake, and Van Gogh
struggled with depression, anxiety, and despair. They paid a heavy price to wrest their gifts from the clutches of non-Being. But this is what true artists do: they make their own frayed lives the cable for the surges of power generated in the creative force fields of Being and non-Being. (Beyond Religion, p. 124) — David N. Elkins

People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know. — Virginia Woolf

Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort - these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work. — Joyce Carol Oates

Most consumers are simultaneously neophilic, curious to discover new things, and deeply neophobic, afraid of anything that is too new. The best hit makers are gifted at creating moments of meaning by marrying new and old, anxiety and understanding. They are architects of familiar surprises. — Derek Thompson