Motivational Quotes

Creativity

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

Best Quotes about Creativity

That which builds is better than that which is built.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Dee Hock

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

Jampolsky, Gerald G.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

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

Koestler, Arthur

The legs are the wheels of creativity.

Einstein, Albert

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.

Cecil B. DeMille

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Mille, Agnes De

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Browder, Charles

20.

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.

21.

Creation is a drug I can't do without.

Mille, Cecil B. De

22.

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

23.

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

George Lois

24.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Robin Green

29.

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

Saxe, John

30.

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

Kroc, Ray

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Caesar, Julius

34.

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

Bono, Edward De

35.

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

Aldiss, Brian

36.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.

Picasso, Pablo

40.

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

Land, Edwin H.

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

Artaud, Antonin

44.

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

Valery, Paul

45.

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

Twain, Mark

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

To create something you must be something.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

50.

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.