A Quote by Abraham Joshua Heschel

Proximity to the crowd, to the majority view, spells the death of creativity. For a soul can create only when alone, and some are chosen for the flowering that takes place in the dark avenues of night.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Quote Topics

Alone Avenues Chosen Create Creativity Crowd Dark Death Flowering Majority Night Only Place Proximity Some Soul Spells Takes View

Quote Author

Abraham Joshua Heschel
Polish - Philosopher
January 11, 1907 - December 23, 1972

I'm too passionate about my work...Acting takes not only concentration, it takes creativity; it takes... your soul.

Farrah Fawcett

This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.

Chuck Palahniuk

Thy soul shall find itself alone ’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone— Not one, of all the crowd, to pry Into thine hour of secrecy. Be silent in that solitude, Which is not loneliness—for then The spirits of the dead who stood In life before thee are again In death around thee—and their will Shall overshadow thee: be still. [...]

Edgar Allan Poe

Stillness alone is the potentiality for creativity; movement alone is creativity restricted to a certain aspect of its expression. But the combination of movement and stillness enables you to unleash your creativity in all directions-wherever the power of your attention takes you.

Deepak Chopra

It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress. In the process by which opinion is formed, it is very probable that, by the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached. It is because we do not yet know which of the many competing new opinions will prove itself the best that we wait until it has gained sufficient support.

Friedrich August von Hayek

The artist is always concerned with a total view of the world. However, when the photographer takes a picture ... the edge of his picture is just as interesting as the middle, one can only guess at the existence of a whole, and the view presented seems chosen by chance.

Eugene Delacroix

I can tell you there is no finer stadium to play in. The traditions that they place in that stadium like when they announce that it's Saturday night in Death Valley, when the band plays, when that crowd stands and cheers for the Tigers, there is no place like it in America.

Les Miles

It takes nothing to join the crowd. It takes everything to stand alone.

Hans Froði Hansen

A soul can create only when alone.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

By the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached.

Friedrich August von Hayek

What's madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall, That place among the rocks--is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have........ ....... Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. ~From "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke

Theodore Roethke

Realism gives me the impression of a mistake. Violence alone escapes the feeling of poverty of those realistic experiences. Only death and desire have the force that oppresses, that takes one's breath away. Only the extremism of desire and death enable one to attain the truth.

Georges Bataille

The Soul is a fact, but it is not physical. ... Survivors of near-death experiences attest that some part of them apparently detaches from their physical bodies following the death of the body, but while that is proof of the soul for them, it does not prove it to us. The Soul is like divine music that only God can hear; it is the force of endless resurrection; the soul is like a fire that never goes out.

Caroline Myss

The dark night of the soul for me was one night in Florida, when I had been on the road for about four years and I realized that everybody around me was on my payroll, that my old friends hadn't been in touch with me and my family didn't know where to get me. I was a very unhappy guy and it was because I was really alone.