In all the creative work that I have done, what has come first is a problem, a puzzle involving discomfort.
Interpretation
Creativity often starts with a challenge that needs to be solved.
Bertrand Russell's quote emphasizes that the foundation of all creative work lies in identifying and grappling with a problem or discomfort. This suggests that creativity is not merely a spontaneous act but often a response to challenges that compel individuals to think critically and innovate.
In practice
A speaker at an art workshop could use this quote to inspire attendees to embrace challenges in their creative journey.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work.
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
If we look at the works of JS Bach ... on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday, from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater than anything we have since discovered.
Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.
The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.
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