Creativity Quote by Pablo Casals

Casals’s line has the clean snap of a rehearsal note: stop romanticizing intention and start practicing it. As a musician who lived through exile, dictatorship, and the long grind of mastery, he’s not offering a motivational poster so much as a method. The phrasing loops on itself - “purpose” and “purposes” - like a scale played twice, deliberately, to expose the gap between wanting and doing. It’s almost comically redundant, and that’s the point: most of us already know what we “purpose” to do; the real problem is that our actions stay improvisational while our ambitions remain pristine.

The specific intent is discipline masquerading as simplicity. Casals elevates the first principle of a life to the first principle of craft: align the inner vow with the outer behavior. “The first thing” isn’t about chronology; it’s about priority. Before talent, before inspiration, before even the outcome, comes intentionality made visible. He’s arguing that purpose is not a private feeling but a public practice.

Subtextually, it’s also a rebuke to the modern habit (and not just modern) of outsourcing meaning to mood. You don’t wait to feel certain, or ready, or affirmed. You build purpose by enacting it, repeatedly, even when it’s boring. In Casals’s world, purpose isn’t discovered; it’s performed.