Motivational Quotes

Creativity

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

- Aldiss, Brian

Best Quotes about Creativity

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Twain, Mark

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

Land, Edwin H.

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.

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

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

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

Artaud, Antonin

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

Bennett, Arnold

10.

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

11.

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

Robin Green

12.

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

13.

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

Sting

14.

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

15.

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

Bono, Edward De

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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

Asch, Sholem

18.

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

19.

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

Alfonso X

20.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

21.

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

Lee, Bruce

22.

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

23.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Jampolsky, Gerald G.

25.

We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

26.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

Land, Edwin H.

30.

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

Valery, Paul

31.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

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.

Frugality without creativity is deprivation.

Amy Dacyczyn

34.

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

35.

The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.

Picasso, Pablo

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Fromm, Erich

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

Cook, Mary Lou

43.

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

Fromm, Erich

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Aldiss, Brian

48.

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

49.

Creation is a drug I can't do without.

Mille, Cecil B. De

50.

To create something you must be something.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von