Motivational Quotes

Creativity

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

Best Quotes about Creativity

Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

Valery, Paul

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

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

Fromm, Erich

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

True creativity often starts where language ends.

Koestler, Arthur

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Genius is initiative on fire.

Jackson, George Holbrook

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

Sandburg, Carl

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.

Norman Podhoretz

10.

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

George Lois

11.

I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.

Proust, Marcel

12.

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

13.

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.

Carl Jung

14.

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

King, Florence

15.

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

16.

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

Eric A. Burns

17.

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

18.

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

Mille, Agnes De

19.

The power in which we must have faith if we would be well, is the creative and curative power which exists in every living thing.

Kellogg, John

20.

Observe Everything. Communicate Well. Draw, Draw, Draw.

Frank Thomas

21.

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

22.

Creativity is...seeing something that doesn't exist already. You need to find out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God.

Michele Shea

23.

Creation is a drug I can't do without.

Mille, Cecil B. De

24.

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

Land, Edwin H.

25.

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

Browder, Charles

26.

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

Persius

27.

When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied:'Only stand out of my light.'Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light.

John W. Gardner

28.

The creative person wants to be a know -it -all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth -century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six months, or six years down the road. But he has faith that it will happen.

Ally, Carl

29.

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

30.

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

Jampolsky, Gerald G.

31.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

32.

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

Sting

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.

Cecil B. DeMille

36.

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

Wheatley, Margaret J.

37.

There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.

Miller, Henry

38.

There were always people like the pope. They serve a certain function, of course. They subsidize us. But, they don't create anything and they must never be allowed to stop the artist from creating.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

39.

It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.

Caesar, Julius

40.

Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?

Horney, Karen

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

The creative process involves getting input, making a recommendation, getting critical review, getting more input, improving the recommendation, getting more critical review... again and again and again.

44.

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 after-life.

Stassinopoulos, Arianna

45.

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.

46.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Fromm, Erich

47.

Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.

Kroc, Ray

48.

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

Alfonso X

49.

The legs are the wheels of creativity.