Creative Courage Quotes & Sayings

A willingness to let go of an old self and allow creative thoughts to remake a person into a better version of oneself requires an act of courage. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Our historical bequest is sublime. I have inherited a fragmented but highly creative
exile and, since 1948, a home. I don't know that I want to settle there. I prefer the
creative spur of exile. () But wherever I am I shall be Jewish, and that sound will
inform every syllable I write. I am blessed with a long ancestry of wisdom, prophecy,
and promise, a line of overwhelming creative achievements, courage, humor, and,
above all, a dogged and chronic permanence, the greatest legacy of all. — Bernice Rubens

The simple truth is that being a creative artist takes courage; it's not a job for the faint of heart. It takes courage each and every time you put a book or poem or painting before the public, because it is, in fact, enormously revealing. — Terri Windling

In those who rest on their unshakable faith, pharisaism and fanaticism are the unmistakable symptoms of doubt which has been repressed. Doubt is not overcome by repression but by courage. Courage does not deny that there is doubt, but it takes the doubt into itself as an expression of its own finitude and affirms the content of an ultimate concern. Courage does not need the safety of an unquestionable conviction. It includes the risk without which no creative life is possible. — Paul Tillich

It takes courage to be creative. Just as soon as you have an idea, you become a minority of one. — E. Paul Torrance

So this, I believe, is the central question upon which all creative living hinges: Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you? — Elizabeth Gilbert

I don't expect executives to be creative but I do expect them to have courage. — Rita Mae Brown

Thought for Today: I dream big! I let go of any limitations on my imagination, and I give voice to my inner wisdom and creative impulses. I shed past fears and doubts, replacing them with courage and love. I nurture my future with the same care that I would give to a newborn baby. — Doreen Virtue

What an amazing creative way to magnify, and illuminate the courage of 30 Sheroes whose courage, leadership and character is symbolic of the many unsung Women Sheroes of past and present. — Emory Douglas

When we dream with the courage of our soul, we dream sacred dreams - fresh, creative, and able to infuse us with passion and courage to act. — Alberto Villoldo

For years, I was watching other people have so much fun playing out their version of authorship, like Louis C.K. and Larry David. As I watched them do their thing, I began to pine for the days when I had a lot less expected of me and, often, a lot more creative freedom. The courage that those guys have is always captivating to me. — Jon Favreau

Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be. — Rollo May

What we shall desire for individuals is now clear: strong creative impulses, overpowering and absorbing the instinct of possession; reverence for others; respect for the fundamental creative impulse in ourselves. A certain kind of self-respect or native pride is necessary to a good life; a man must not have a sense of utter inward defeat if he is to remain whole, but must feel the courage and the hope and the will to live by the best that is in him, whatever outward or inward obstacles it may encounter. So far as it lies in a man's own power, his life will realize its best possibilities if it has three things: creative rather than possessive impulses, reverence for others, and respect for the fundamental impulse in himself. — Bertrand Russell

It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power to an inborn talent. In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome. The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring an effort. Creativity takes courage. — Henri Matisse

MFA in a Box is designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor - but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor keeps it from being laugh-out-loud funny. — John Rember

Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action.
Do it or don't do it.
It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself,. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.
You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.
Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got. — Steven Pressfield

The message of love or beauty or hope needs to be said by a hundred thousand different voices, written by a hundred thousand different pens, at a hundred thousand different times in history, different places in the world, different sectors of society, in different genres and registers, simply to be heard by the billions of ears and hearts that lie waiting for a truth which fires their soul, answers their question, speaks to their heart. — Lucy H. Pearce

But if you don't have the courage, let's try to get you some. Because creative living is a path for the brave. We all know this. And we all know that when courage dies, creativity dies with it. We all know that fear is a desolate boneyard where our dreams go to desiccate in the hot sun. This is common knowledge; sometimes we just don't know what to do about it. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things
childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves
that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers. — Salman Rushdie

You need courage to be creative. You need the courage to see things differently, courage to go against the crowd, courage to take a different approach, courage to stand alone, if you have to, courage to choose activity over inactivity. — Jim Rohn

When we have the courage to claim space for ourselves. When we risk creativity. When we relish our sensuality. When we honor our lives and their experiences as valuable. When we create from a female body, expressing ourselves in a woman's voice, using a woman's language. We begin to bloom. — Lucy H. Pearce

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. — Joseph Chilton Pearce

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

It always seemed to me," she said at last, "that it must require a great deal of courage to be an artist, if only because the creative process is such a lonely one. I should imagine it must be all the more difficult for a woman. — Richard Yates

Unexplained pain may sometimes direct our attention to something unacknowledged, something we are afraid to know or feel. Then it holds us to our integrity, claiming the attention we withhold. The thing which calls our attention may be a repressed experience or some unexpressed and important part of who we are. Whatever we have denied may stop us and dam the creative flow of our lives. Avoiding pain, we may linger in the vicinity of our wounds, sometime for many years, gathering the courage to experience them. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Good story' means something worth telling that the world wants to hear. Finding this is your lonely task ... But the love of a good story, of terrific characters and a world driven by your passion, courage, and creative gifts is still not enough. Your goal must be a good story well told. — Robert McKee

When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thought of peers critiquing my work - oh, God. — Nathaniel Philbrick

Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built. — Rollo May

There is an art to grieving. To grieve well the loss of anyone or anything
a parent, a love, a child, an era, a home, a job
is a creative act. It takes attention and patience and courage. But many of us do not know how to grieve. We were never taught, and we don't see examples of full-bodied grieving around us. Our culture favors the fast-food model of mourning
get over it quick and get back to work; affix the bandage of "closure" and move on. — Elizabeth Lesser

All artists, they say, are a little mad. This madness is, to a certain extent, a self-created myth designed to keep the generality away from the phenomenally close-knit creative community. Yet, in the world of the artists, the consciously eccentric are always respectful and admiring if those who have the courage to be genuinely a little mad. — Angela Carter

Perfect and bulletproof are seductive, but they don't exist in the human experience. We must walk into the arena, whatever it may be - a new relationship, an important meeting, our creative process, or a difficult family conversation - with courage and the willingness to engage. Rather than sitting on the sidelines and hurling judgment and advice, we must dare to show up and let ourselves be seen. This is vulnerability. This is daring greatly. — Brene Brown

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. it is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely toleration, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within the interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters — Audre Lorde

When the economic well-being of their nation demanded a strong and creative response, my colleagues at the Federal Reserve ... mustered the moral courage to do what was necessary. — Ben Bernanke

It takes courage to not only accept our limitations but embrace our potential. To deny our creative nature is to choose a life where we are less and thus responsible for less. We see ourselves as created beings, so we choose to survive. When we see ourselves as creative beings, we must instead create. — Erwin Raphael McManus

Because creative living is a path for the brave. We all know this. And we all know that when courage dies, creativity dies with it. We all know that fear is a desolate boneyard where our dreams go to desiccate in the hot sun. — Elizabeth Gilbert

The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find. — Phil Cousineau

Creative Living, Defined So this, I believe, is the central question upon which all creative living hinges: Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you? Look, I don't know what's hidden within you. I have no way of knowing such a thing. You yourself may barely know, although I suspect you've caught glimpses. I don't know your capacities, your aspirations, your longings, your secret talents. But surely something wonderful is sheltered inside you. — Elizabeth Gilbert

The essential ingredients for creativity remain exactly the same for everybody: courage, enchantment, permission, persistence, trust - and those elements are universally accessible. Which does not mean that creative living is always easy; it merely means that creative living is always possible. — Elizabeth Gilbert

That combination of thought and action defines creative confidence: the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out. — Tom Kelley

Creative takes courage -Henri Matisse — J. L. Silvermist