Motivational Quotes

Creativity

The whole difference between construction and creation is this; that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

- Dickens, Charles

Best Quotes about Creativity

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

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.

11.

The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.

Picasso, Pablo

12.

Creation is a drug I can't do without.

Mille, Cecil B. De

13.

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

14.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

15.

All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself -- civilization, in a word is the fruits of the creative artist. It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape.

Miller, Henry

16.

True creativity often starts where language ends.

Koestler, Arthur

17.

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

Wheatley, Margaret J.

18.

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

Koestler, Arthur

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.

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

21.

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

Artaud, Antonin

22.

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.

23.

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.

24.

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

Valery, Paul

25.

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

Kroc, Ray

26.

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

Frank Thomas

27.

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

28.

Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.

Kneller, George

29.

I do not seek, I find.

Picasso, Pablo

30.

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

Fromm, Erich

31.

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.

Dee Hock

32.

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

33.

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

34.

To create something you must be something.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

38.

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.

39.

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

Bono, Edward De

40.

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

Alfonso X

41.

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

Bennett, Arnold

42.

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

Jampolsky, Gerald G.

43.

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

44.

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

Aldiss, Brian

45.

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

46.

Frugality without creativity is deprivation.

Amy Dacyczyn

47.

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

Land, Edwin H.

48.

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

49.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

50.

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