Motivational Quotes

Creativity

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

Best Quotes about Creativity

The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.

Picasso, Pablo

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

Artaud, Antonin

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

Valery, Paul

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

Land, Edwin H.

Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.

Cecil B. DeMille

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

Jampolsky, Gerald G.

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

I do not seek, I find.

Picasso, Pablo

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Caesar, Julius

13.

Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.

Bennett, Arnold

14.

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.

15.

To create something you must be something.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.

Lee, Bruce

19.

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

King, Florence

20.

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

21.

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

22.

The person who can combine frames of reference and draw connections between ostensibly unrelated points of view is likely to be the one who makes the creative breakthrough.

Shekerjian, Denise

23.

An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.

Ray, Man

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

Sandburg, Carl

29.

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

30.

It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.

Maugham, W. Somerset

31.

Genius is initiative on fire.

Jackson, George Holbrook

32.

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

33.

The legs are the wheels of creativity.

Einstein, Albert

34.

Frugality without creativity is deprivation.

Amy Dacyczyn

35.

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

Alfonso X

36.

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

37.

Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.

Twain, Mark

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Fromm, Erich

42.

A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstinting has been naught.

Yeats, William Butler

43.

I started concentrating so hard on my vision that I lost sight.

Robin Green

44.

Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.

Cook, Mary Lou

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

Bono, Edward De

48.

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

Browder, Charles

49.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

50.

That which builds is better than that which is built.