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

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

Browder, Charles

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

Bennett, Arnold

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

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

Lee, Bruce

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

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

Aldiss, Brian

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

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

Frugality without creativity is deprivation.

Amy Dacyczyn

10.

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

Alfonso X

11.

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

Robin Green

12.

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.

13.

Genius is initiative on fire.

Jackson, George Holbrook

14.

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.

15.

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

Eric A. Burns

16.

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

17.

We try not to have ideas, preferring accidents. To create, you must empty yourself of every artistic thought.

George, Gilbert

18.

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

Land, Edwin H.

19.

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

20.

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

Valery, Paul

21.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

Frank Thomas

28.

Creation is a drug I can't do without.

Mille, Cecil B. De

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.

To create something you must be something.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

32.

The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.

Picasso, Pablo

33.

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

Bono, Edward De

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Asch, Sholem

37.

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

38.

The legs are the wheels of creativity.

Einstein, Albert

39.

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

40.

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

King, Florence

41.

Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.

Cecil B. DeMille

42.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

44.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

45.

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

Wheatley, Margaret J.

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

Artaud, Antonin

50.

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