Robert K. Greenleaf Quotes

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

I think everyone is born creative but it can be suppressed by fear.

I don't think the goal is, 'How big a star did you ever become?' I think the goal is, 'Were you able to express yourself?'

I do big films just to experience personal satisfaction.

I'm always trying to prove to my 17-year-old self that I can do creative things I thought weren't possible.

I started using this outlet of creativity - you know, going to the studio, writing, meeting these writers and producers - as the best form of representing myself to my fullest potential.

When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again.

What inspires me today is a desire to get closer to an understanding of what my artistic capacities are with the hope of organically sharing my gifts with an audience in the most heightened way I possibly can.

To be and to be creative are synonymous. It is impossible to be and not to be creative. But that impossible thing has happened, that ugly phenomenon has happened, because all your creative sources have been plugged, blocked, destroyed, and your whole energy has been forced into some activity that the society thinks is going to pay.

If life is a blank canvas and all people are artists, the big challenge we all face may be expressed this way: Will we ultimately produce something approaching a masterpiece, an acceptable but not particularly memorable work of art, or a creation that wouldn't even be purchased at a yard sale?

With spiritual growth comes new creative potential, leading to the realization that you are pure potential, able to fill any creative impulse.

We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.

The creative process must be explored... as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves.

The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul. No matter our talents, education, backgrounds, or abilities, we each have an inherent wish to create something that did not exist before. Creation brings satisfaction and fulfillment. We develop ourselves and others when we take organized matter into our hands and mold it into something of beauty.

Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.

Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete.

When my creative side isn't being fulfilled, I see it affect me in a negative way and I'm not able to become that father/husband/man that I want to be. So it's almost like this dark half that you have to satiate in order to become full, in order to become a good person.

It took me a long time to understand not to get caught up in other people's expectations. It really comes down to creative fulfillment. It took me a while to realize I don't want to just be on a show to be on a show.

Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work.

O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives.

Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

My songs are like kids. I love them all. I encourage them to grow, to reach their full potential, and then send them out into the world.

The greatest trouble with most of us is that our demands upon ourselves are so feeble, the call upon the great within of us so weak and intermittent that it makes no impression upon the creative energies; it lacks the force that transmutes desires into realities.