Creativity Quotes
Most popular creativity quotes
So you see, imagination needs moodling—long inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
The process of writing, any form of creativity, is a power intensifying life.
The puzzle that I'm now trying to unravel is suggested by the observation that the creative person, in the inspirational phase of the creative furor, loses his past and his future and lives only in the moment. He is all there, totally immersed, fascinated and absorbed in the present, in the current situation, in the here-now, with the matter-in-hand.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality.
Nothing can be created out of nothing.
All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.
Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
The challenge of creative beings is to be suspicious of every discourse, thought, affirmation, or proposal that presents itself as "the only possible path." There are always others. There is always another possibility.
If to build something we always undo and step on what others have done before us, how can we create something solid?
The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.
The things we fear most in organizations—fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances—are the primary sources of creativity.
Creativity is just connecting things.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away.
Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
Young men are fitter to invent than to judge.
Originality is not seen in single words or even sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking and writing.
Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the aesthete unoffended.
Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.
I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.
Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.
I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.
The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive and more constructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person.
Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps .
No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.
In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.
We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.
Men are like trees: each one must put forth the leaf that is created in him.
Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.
You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.
When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.
Original thought is a straightforward process. It's easy enough when you know what to do. You simply combine in appropriate doses the blatantly false and the patently true.
We can't be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for what's new.
Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity.
Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory. Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. It is not the previously known.
Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.
You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person.
That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.
The creative impulses of men are always at war with their possessive impulses.
A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.
The more you reason, the less you create.
Isn't exile one of the sources of literary creation throughout history? The man who is in harmony with his society, his culture, with himself, cannot be a creator.
Potentially creative men...build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, last but not least, nutritionally in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden.
A single creative act has the potential to feed a continent. One creative act can cause a torrent to break through stone.
What about the creative state? In it a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences, and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.
Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think creation's.
The capacity to be puzzled is indeed the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.
Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam.
Creation lives alone in a small temple. Only one may worship at a time.
The creative imagination can grasp characters and conditions not directly experienced, because the creator has access to all parts of his personality. To use the fashionable word, he has empathy with characters unlike him, because he knows that deep down he shares some of their unlovely traits.
Creativity always dies a quick death in rooms that house conference tables.
Discontent is at the root of the creative process: the most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capacities and talents.
If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.
Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion, and fear.
Creativity is a lot like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope. You look at a set of elements, the same ones everyone else sees, but then reassemble those floating bits and pieces into an enticing new possibility.
Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty—as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.
Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
True creativity often starts where language ends.
Every creative act is a sudden cessation of stupidity.
The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.
Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.
Curiosity is the key to creativity.
It's the ability to see things a new way, and from that insight to produce something that didn't exist before—something original. It sometimes means piercing the mundane to find the marvelous—or looking beyond the marvelous to find the mundane.
Imagination plus action equals creation.
Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense—the creative act.
Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.
Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an afterlife.
Creativity is an act of defiance. You're challenging the status quo. You're questioning accepted truths and principles. You're asking three universal questions that mock conventional wisdom: "Why do I have to obey the rules?" "Why can't I be different?" "Why can't I do it my way?"
Being creative without talent is a bit like being a perfectionist and not being able to do anything right.
A writer didn't need "an" idea for a book; she needed at least forty. And "get" was the wrong word, implying that you received an idea as you would a gift.
I don't understand the process of imagination—though I know that I am very much at its mercy. I feel that these ideas are floating around in the air and they pick me to settle upon.
If you're going to create, create a lot. Creativity is not like playing the slot machines, where failure to win means you go home broke. With creativity, if you don't win, you're usually no worse off than if you hadn't played.
I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within.
The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.
For analytic problems, lack of inhibitory control is a bug. For insight problems, it's a feature. Some have called this phenomenon the "inspiration paradox"—the idea that "innovation and creativity are greatest when we are not at our best, at least with respect to our circadian rhythms."
