Motivational Quotes

Creativity

Humanity can be quite cold to those whose eyes see the world differently.

- Eric A. Burns

Best Quotes about Creativity

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.

Auden, W. H.

Every time we say, "Let there be!" in any form, something happens.

Stella Terrill Mann

To create something you must be something.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations.

Jampolsky, Gerald G.

Out of nothing can come, and nothing can become nothing.

Persius

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.

Bono, Edward De

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives its final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.

Duchamp, Marcel

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

Artaud, Antonin

The good ideas are all hammered out in agony by individuals, not spewed out by groups.

Browder, Charles

10.

The things we fear most in organizations -- fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances -- are the primary sources of creativity.

Wheatley, Margaret J.

11.

The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything --and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the productive man a yet higher species.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

12.

Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.

Klee, Paul

13.

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

14.

It is wise to learn; it is God-like to create.

Saxe, John

15.

Genius is initiative on fire.

Jackson, George Holbrook

16.

When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation.

Sackville, Margaret

17.

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.

Fromm, Erich

18.

Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.

Dorfsman, Lou

19.

I do my best work when I am in pain and turmoil.

Sting

20.

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.

Rosenberg, Harold

21.

The human mind cannot create anything. It produces nothing until after having been fertilized by experience and meditation; its acquisitions are the gems of its production.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

22.

Creativity comes from awakening and directing men's higher natures, which originate in the primal depths of the uni- verse and are appointed by Heaven.

I Ching

23.

One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.

Sandburg, Carl

24.

One measure of how creative you are is how you respond to changes in your circumstances and environment. How flexible are you? Consider how water adapts to its environment: evaporation, condensation, snowflake, melting, flowing, goes around rocks, fills containers, etc.

25.

We try not to have ideas, preferring accidents. To create, you must empty yourself of every artistic thought.

George, Gilbert

26.

Thoughts give birth to a creative force that is neither elemental nor sidereal. Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow. When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven.

Paracelsus, Philipus A.

27.

Because of their courage, their lack of fear, they (creative people) are willing to make silly mistakes. The truly creative person is one who can think crazy; such a person knows full well that many of his great ideas will prove to be worthless. The creative person is flexible -- he is able to change as the situation changes, to break habits, to face indecision and changes in conditions without undue stress. He is not threatened by the unexpected as rigid, inflexible people are.

Goble, Frank

28.

Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity.

Houston, Jean

29.

Had I been present at the creation of the world I would have proposed some improvements.

Alfonso X

30.

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.

George Lois

31.

The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

32.

Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.

Jung, Carl

33.

Frugality without creativity is deprivation.

Amy Dacyczyn

34.

Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty -- as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.

King, Florence

35.

The essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail.

Land, Edwin H.

36.

I have asked a lot of my emotions --one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something, not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.

37.

The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.

Mille, Agnes De

38.

The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

39.

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy-the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.

Podhoretz, Norman

40.

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

Blake, William

41.

Creation is a drug I can't do without.

Mille, Cecil B. De

42.

It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.

Williams, Tennessee

43.

The lash may force men to physical labor, it cannot force them to spiritual creativity.

Asch, Sholem

44.

It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm.

Henle, Mary

45.

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Koestler, Arthur

46.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

Hemingway, Ernest

48.

The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the creative is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.

Sarton, May

49.

Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. The creative explorer looks for history in a hardware store and fashion in an airport.

Wieder, Robert

50.

It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Doctorow, E. L.