On Love And Creativity

“I saw, more than anything, that relationships are not sustained by violence but by love. Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother did that for me, and the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her.”

- Trevor Noah, in Born A Crime – Stories from a South African Childhood

“A big breakthrough for me – in my job as a writer, but really in life as a whole – came when I figured out that making solid progress on creative work, and enjoying the process rather than hating it, is in large part a matter of being willing to be who you actually are.

This risks sounding both incoherent and clichéd, a terrible combination, so I’ll explain more below. But the short version is simply this: there are certain aspects to your personality – things you’re good at, things you like doing or don’t – that are obvious to you on some level, and probably very obvious to people around you, but that for various reasons you really don’t want to acknowledge. You should, though – not least because you’ll almost certainly be a lot more productive, and find lots more fun and meaning in what you do.”

- Oliver Burkeman, from The Imperfectionist blog

“The ultimate end of creation, then, is union in love between God and loving creatures. God did not create us to get the cosmic, infinite joy of mutual love and glorification, but to share it.”

- George Marsden, quoted by Tim Keller in The Reason for God – Belief in an Age of Skepticism