“The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

Joyce’s famous formulation of artistic detachment and the invisible creator. · Aesthetic discussion in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

• Art
• Creation
• Detachment

“The poet is truly a thief of fire.”

Original: Le Poète est vraiment voleur de Feu. — The poet is cast as a Promethean figure who takes transformative knowledge and power beyond ordinary human limits. · Letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871 (French)

• Creation
• Knowledge
• Poetry

“Every mother should endeavor to be a true artist. I do not mean by this that every woman should be a painter, sculptor, musician, poet or writer.”

Her metaphor of motherhood as an art emphasises the creative responsibility of raising children. · Address, Enlightened Motherhood, 1892

• Creation
• Education
• Motherhood

“The most complete act is that of constructing, because a work demands love, meditation, obedience to one's finest thought and invention.”

Original: Une œuvre demande l'amour, la méditation, l'obéissance à ta plus belle pensée, l'invention de lois par ton âme. — Creation is understood as a synthesis of thought, discipline, love and invention. · Eupalinos ou l'Architecte (French)

• Craft
• Creation
• Love

“To fashion something beautiful simply because one feels like doing it. To purify one's mind by projecting into life what is accumulated there by some curious grace of nature.”

Art as inner necessity rather than market duty · The Whistler Book

• Art
• Beauty
• Creation

“Of all acts, the most complete is that of building.”

Original: De tous les actes, le plus complet est celui de construire. — Building unites thought, labour, imagination and material action in a single creative act. · Eupalinos ou l'Architecte (French)

• Achievement
• Creation
• Work

“The mind is a mirror, not only reflecting, but itself creating, the forms of thought.”

Exploring the active rather than merely receptive nature of the human mind. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

• Creation
• Mind
• Thought

“Style is the artist's breath of life, which, with divine power, he blows into his clay and makes it a living soul in his own image.”

Form as animation rather than ornament · Essay, The Personal Note

• Art
• Creation
• Style

“I draw the bow; the symphony stirs in the depths, or leaps onto the stage.”

Original: Je lance un coup d’archet: la symphonie fait son remuement dans les profondeurs, ou vient d’un bond sur la scène. — Poetic creation is imagined as the release of something already stirring beneath conscious awareness. · Letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871 (French)

• Creation
• Music
• Poetry

“The difficulty with writing a play is not in writing it, but in getting it produced.”

Capturing the practical obstacles that can stand between artistic creation and public recognition · Creative Power

• Creation
• Theatre
• Writing

“The real occasion was this: a shoemaker's 'prentice making holiday with his sweetheart.”

Carey's account of the humble real-life circumstances behind the song · Preface to Sally in Our Alley, 1729

• Creation
• Love
• Observation

“The one who has imagination, how easily they can draw a world out of nothing.”

Original: El que tiene imaginación, con qué facilidad saca de la nada un mundo. — A compact celebration of imagination as a creative power capable of transforming emptiness into an entire world. · Prose remark, commonly attributed (Spanish)

• Creation
• Creativity
• Imagination

“The imagination is one of the forces of nature.”

Refuses to set the mind apart from the natural world · Adagia, notebook aphorisms

• Creation
• Imagination
• Nature

“One must be something in order to make something; Dante seems great, but he had centuries of culture behind him.”

Original: Man muß etwas sein, um etwas zu machen. Dante erscheint uns groß, aber er hatte eine Kultur von Jahrhunderten hinter sich. — Goethe connects individual achievement with the accumulated culture and formation that make it possible. · Conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann, 20 October 1828 (German)

• Creation
• Culture
• Greatness

“In the realms of creation, which are also realms of pride, the need to distinguish oneself is inseparable from existence itself.”

Original: Dans les domaines de la création, qui sont aussi les domaines de l'orgueil, la nécessité de se distinguer est indivisible de l'existence même. — Creative individuality is linked to the desire to establish a distinctive identity. · Variété (French)

• Creation
• Originality
• Pride

“Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature.”

The poet is a maker who can improve or remake what nature gives · Essay, The Defence of Poesy

• Creation
• Imagination
• Poetry

“The unknown requires new forms.”

Original: L’inconnu réclame des formes nouvelles. — Rimbaud argues that genuinely new experience demands equally innovative artistic expression. · Letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871 (French)

• Creation
• Form
• Innovation

“The poet is a creator, not an iconoclast, and never will tamely endeavor to say in prose what can only be expressed in song.”

Poetry as making, not as a substitute for argument · Critical essay

• Creation
• Expression
• Poetry

“One must be something in order to make something.”

Original: Man muß etwas sein, um etwas zu machen. — Great creative work requires the inner development of the person who undertakes it. · Conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann, 20 October 1828 (German)

• Art
• Character
• Creation

“It is obvious to me: I witness my thought coming into being; I watch it, I listen to it.”

Original: Cela m’est évident: j’assiste à l’éclosion de ma pensée: je la regarde, je l’écoute. — Rimbaud describes thought as an unfolding process that the poet observes rather than completely controls. · Letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871 (French)

• Consciousness
• Creation
• Thought

“The work flows from the deepest part of your life, yet it does not merge with you.”

Original: Cette œuvre découle du plus intime de ta vie, et cependant elle ne se confond pas avec toi. — A finished creation becomes independent of its maker even though it originates in the maker's deepest self. · Eupalinos ou l'Architecte (French)

• Art
• Creation
• Identity

“The critic is surely himself a literary creator, and his work starts with a spontaneous surge of piety, and is inducted by the contagion of art into a composition of his own.”

He gives literary criticism a creative dignity, describing the critic as an artist responding to art. · Essay, Criticism, Inc.

• Art
• Creation
• Criticism

“Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.”

A concise formulation of Joyce’s early aesthetic theory. · Notebook entry, Paris, 28 March 1903

• Art
• Beauty
• Creation

“Whoever wants to make something great must have developed his education to such a degree that he can raise lesser reality to the height of his spirit.”

Original: Wer aber etwas Großes machen will, muß seine Bildung so gesteigert haben, daß er gleich den Griechen imstande sei, die geringere reale Natur zu der Höhe seines Geistes heranzuheben. — Goethe sees artistic greatness as the transformation of observed reality through cultivated intelligence. · Conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann, 20 October 1828 (German)

• Art
• Creation
• Education