Motivational Quotes

Creativity

That which builds is better than that which is built.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Creativity

When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation.

Sackville, Margaret

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

Wheatley, Margaret J.

The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.

Picasso, Pablo

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Fromm, Erich

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

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 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

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

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

10.

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

Alfonso X

11.

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

12.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Jampolsky, Gerald G.

21.

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

Twain, Mark

22.

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

Sting

23.

I do not seek, I find.

Picasso, Pablo

24.

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

25.

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

Bennett, Arnold

26.

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

Cook, Mary Lou

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

Frank Thomas

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Land, Edwin H.

36.

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

37.

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

Robin Green

38.

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

Valery, Paul

39.

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

George Lois

40.

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

George, Gilbert

41.

I have asked a lot of my emotions --one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something, not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Sandburg, Carl

46.

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

Lee, Bruce

47.

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

48.

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

King, Florence

49.

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

Fromm, Erich

50.

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