Motivational Quotes

Creativity

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

Best Quotes about Creativity

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

Lee, Bruce

I do not seek, I find.

Picasso, Pablo

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

George Lois

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

To create something you must be something.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Out of nothing can come, and nothing can become nothing.

Persius

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

George, Gilbert

14.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Bennett, Arnold

19.

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

20.

Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.

Cecil B. DeMille

21.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

Artaud, Antonin

23.

True creativity often starts where language ends.

Koestler, Arthur

24.

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.

25.

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

King, Florence

26.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

27.

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

28.

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

Wheatley, Margaret J.

29.

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

30.

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

Land, Edwin H.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Valery, Paul

35.

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

36.

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

Fromm, Erich

37.

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

Mille, Agnes De

38.

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

Caesar, Julius

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

Carl Jung

43.

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

Aldiss, Brian

44.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Frank Thomas

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Cook, Mary Lou