creation Quotes

“Man is made or unmade by himself; in the armoury of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself; he also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace.”

“An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work.”

“It looked like an experiment gone terribly wrong - something from a nightmare. Part animal, part machine, the Griever rolled and clicked along the stone pathway. Its body resembled a gigantic slug, sparsely covered in hair and glistening with slime, grotesquely pulsating in and out as it breathed. It had no distinguishable head or tail, but front to end it was at least six feet long, four feet thick.”

“Your art would follow nature, just as a pupil imitates his master; ... your art is almost God’s grandchild.”

“If God had amused himself inventing the lilies of the field, he surely knocked His own socks off with the African parasites.”

″‘When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day without a lot of dubious middle managers.‘”

“They define virtue thus—that it is a living according to Nature, and think that we are made by God for that end; they believe that a man then follows the dictates of Nature when he pursues or avoids things according to the direction of reason.”

“But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to “creation of the world,” the will to the causa prima.”

“Around the hero everything becomes a tragedy; around the demigod everything becomes a satyr-play; and around God everything becomes—what? perhaps a ‘world’?”

“We are commanded to study His Torah! We are commanded to sit in the light of the Presence! It is for this that we were created! . . . Not the world, but the people of Israel!”

“Let me say for now that we knew once the Creation was broken, true fathering would be much more lacking than mothering. Don’t misunderstand me, both are needed- but an emphasis on fathering is necessary because of the enormity of its absence.”

“every time God forgives us, God is saying that God’s own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.”

″‘Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.‘”

“‘Think about it, Cath. That’s what makes a god—or a mother. There’s nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself.’”

″‘You see, friends,’ he said, ‘that before the new, clean world I gave you is seven hours old, a force of evil has already entered it; waked and brought hither by this son of Adam.’ The Beasts, even Strawberry, all turned their eyes on Digory till he felt that he wished the ground would swallow him up. ‘But do not be cast down,’ said Aslan, still speaking to the Beasts. ‘Evil will come of that evil, but it is still a long way off, and I will see to it that the worst falls upon myself. In the meantime, let us take such order that for many hundred years yet this shall be a merry land in a merry world. And as Adam’s race has done the harm, Adam’s race shall help to heal it.‘”

“A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard.”

“When matter is put aside, all creation becomes exclusively mental, that’s all.”

“Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.”

“You don’t have to test everything to destruction just to see if you made it right.”

“‘I like music,’ she said slowly, ‘because when I hear it, I . . . I lose myself within myself, if that makes any sense. I become empty and full all at once, and I can feel the whole earth roiling around me. When I play, I’m not . . . for once, I’m not destroying. I’m creating.’”

“The Earth received the wild beasts, and the yielding air the birds. But an animated being, more holy than these, more fitted to receive higher faculties, and which could rule over the rest, was still wanting. Then Man was formed.”

“At first, the sea, the earth, and the heaven, which covers all things, were the only face of nature throughout the whole universe, which men have named Chaos; a rude and undigested mass, and nothing more than an inert weight, and the discordant atoms of things not harmonizing, heaped together in the same spot.”

“Depart from my temple, and cover your heads, and loosen the garments girt around you, and throw behind your backs the bones of your great mother.”

“A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.”

“The individual human mind. In a child’s power to master the multiplication table there is more sanctity than in all your shouted ‘Amens!‘, ‘Holy, Holies!’ and ‘Hosannahs!’ An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man’s knowledge is more of a miracle than any sticks turned to snakes, or the parting of waters!”

″ ‘Can it think?’ ‘Not only can it think, but it can reason and compromise,’ said the Creator.”

“Your mind was made to know and love God.”

“All that looks like reality to us is dependent on God. There is creation and Creator, nothing more. And creation gets all its meaning and purpose from God.”

“The warrior knows that their imagination is not a place to escape but to create.”

“This Universe the womb is where I plant Seed of all lives!”

“We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.”

“The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

″ ‘God,’ said the angel touching his sleeve gently, ‘Get some rest tomorrow...’ ‘I can’t,’ said God, ‘I’m so close to creating something so close to myself.’ ”

″‘How could any Lord have made this world?’ she asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that.”

“Already I have one who heals herself when she is sick...can feed a family of six on one pound of hamburger...and can get a nine year old to stand under a shower.”

“The angel circled the model of a mother very slowly. ‘It’s too soft’ she sighed. ‘But tough!’ said God excitedly. ‘You can imagine what this mother can do or endure.’ ”

″ One pair that sees through closed doors when she asks, ‘What are you kids doing in there?’ when she already knows. Another here in the back of her head that sees what she shouldn’t but what she has to know, and of course the ones here in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and say. ‘I understand and I love you’ without so much as uttering a word.”

“When the Good Lord was creating mothers, He was into His sixth day of ‘overtime’ when the angel appeared and said. ‘You’re doing a lot of fiddling around on this one.’ ”

“No, I don’t think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”

“Everything is created twice, first in the mind and then in reality.”

“The boundaries of your life are merely a creation of the self.”

“The Flying Spaghetti Monster made the platypus because, unlike scientists, He has a sense of humor. It’s an unlikely sign from God--and until someone can prove me wrong, that’s my theory.”

Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.”

″‘As boyfriends go, Paulie Bleeker is totally boss. He is the cheese to my macaroni. And I know people are supposed to fall in love before they reproduce, but—I guess normalcy isn’t really our style.‘”

“In the creative process you do not make choices about what you do not want. You make choices about what you do want.”

“Creating is no problem - problem solving is not creating.”

“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

“I’ve never felt that it was anything other than real: discovery rather than invention.”

“Wabi-sabi-ness in no way depends on knowledge of the creator’s background or personality. In fact, it is best if the creator is no distinction, invisible, or anonymous.”

“Creating is living doubly . . . Creation is the great mime.”

“Do you lie awake at night to come up with all you witty replies for the following day?”

“More than sixty years ago, mathematical logicians, by defining precisely the concept of an algorithm, gave content to the ancient human idea of an effective calculation. Their definitions led to the creation of the digital computer, an interesting example of thought bending matter to its ends.”

“One of the biggest oxymorons is the term ‘self-made’ man or woman. No man or woman ever ‘made’ him- or herself. The psalmist understood this when he wrote, ‘It is [God] who has made us, and not we ourselves’ (Psalm 100:3, NKJV). I also love what he goes on to say at the end of the verse: ‘We are His people, and the sheep of His pasture.‘”

“But Odin and his brothers created the earth, it was they who made Midgard. The sun shone from the south upon the stones of their hall, and the land turned green with growing plant-life.”

“We must acknowledge that we depend on God and choose to live our life for Him. Even though we are a new creation, we still must decide to live like we are.”

Caldecott Medal winner Peggy Rathmann has created a highly original story told in a lilting text and a bold new style with classic black silhouettes against stunning skies of many colors that change and glow as afternoon turns into evening.

“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.”

“Creation is intelligible and Allah is felt and witnessed with the believers and the people of unveiling. Allah is intelligible with other classes, and creation is witnessed.”

“It says that this femininity is so mysterious and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of life that man-made science may never be able to understand it.”

“Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew.”

When God created woman / He gave her not two breasts but three. / When the middle one got in the way, / God performed surgery. / Woman stood before God / With the middle breast in hand / Said,“What do we do with the useless boob?” / And God created man.

“On earth, Sky Mother created humans, her children of blood and bone. In the heavens she gave birth to the gods and goddesses. Each would come to embody a different fragment of her soul.”

“It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a word of God can unite.”

“The wisest men in the world have but one opinion, and it is this. We know that Adam gave names to all the flowers created, and as this flower has remained unnamed since the days of Eden, it is doubtless one which was forgotten at the Creation, and the Lord has only just remembered to make it.”

“And I’d say to myself as I looked so lazily down at the sea: ‘There’s nobody else in the world, and the world was made for me.‘”

“Maybe earth and air accumulate, but it takes the wisdom of the Almighty God to devise the wing of a moth. If there ever was a miracle, this whole process is one.”

“Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.”