quotes by Julia Cameron

""As you move toward a dream, the dream moves toward you.""
— Julia Cameron

""Life is a spiritual dance and that our unseen partner has steps to teach us if we will allow ourselves to be led. The next time you are restless, remind yourself it is the universe asking 'Shall we dance?""
— Julia Cameron

"Most of us are not raised to actively encounter our destiny. We may not know that we have one. As children, we are seldom told we have a place in life that is uniquely ours alone. Instead, we are encouraged to believe that our life should somehow fulfill the expectations of others, that we will (or should) find our satisfactions as they have found theirs. Rather than being taugh to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are, in effect, trained to listen to others' versions of ourselves. We are brought up in our life as told to us by someone else! When we survey our lives, seeking to fulfill our creativity, we often see we had a dream that went glimmering because we believed, and those around us believed, that the dream was beyond our reach. Many of us would have been, or at least might have been, done, tried something, if...
If we had known who we really were."
— Julia Cameron

""The voice of our original self is often muffled, overwhelmed, even strangled, by the voices of other people’s expectations.”"
— Julia Cameron

"We are not accustomed to thinking that God's will for us and our own inner dreams can coincide."
— Julia Cameron

"Creativity requires faith. Faith requires that we relinquish control."
— Julia Cameron

"Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite -- getting something down."
— Julia Cameron

"In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me."
— Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)

"Survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention...the capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention."
— Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)

"We should write because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It makes it directly and specifically our own. We should write because humans are spiritual beings and writing is a powerful form of prayer and meditation, connecting us both to our own insights and to a higher and deeper level of inner guidance.

We should write because writing brings clarity and passion to the act of living. Writing is sensual, experiential, grounding. We should write because writing is good for the soul. We should write because writing yields us a body of work, a felt path through the world we live in.

We should write, above all, because we are writers, whether we call ourselves that or not."
— Julia Cameron (The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life)

" Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise."
— Julia Cameron

"Agendas tend to drain the life out of relationships."
— Julia Cameron (Letters to a Young Artist: Building a Life in Art)

"FESTIVITY BREEDS CREATIVITY. RIGIDITY BREEDS DESPAIR"
— Julia Cameron (Walking in this World)

"Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise...As creative channels, we need to trust the darkness. "
— Julia Cameron

"When we walk, the two halves of our brains converse."
— Julia Cameron