Motivational Quotes

Creativity

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

- Maugham, W. Somerset

Best Quotes about Creativity

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

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Fromm, Erich

Genius is initiative on fire.

Jackson, George Holbrook

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.

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

Bennett, Arnold

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

Land, Edwin H.

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

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

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

Wheatley, Margaret J.

10.

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

George Lois

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Asch, Sholem

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

Creation is a drug I can't do without.

Mille, Cecil B. De

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

True creativity often starts where language ends.

Koestler, Arthur

22.

Frugality without creativity is deprivation.

Amy Dacyczyn

23.

Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the

Woolf, Virginia

24.

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

Eric A. Burns

25.

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

Sting

26.

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

Browder, Charles

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Mille, Agnes De

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

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

34.

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

Kroc, Ray

35.

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

36.

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

Aldiss, Brian

37.

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

38.

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

Jampolsky, Gerald G.

39.

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

George, Gilbert

40.

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

Valery, Paul

41.

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

Lee, Bruce

42.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

43.

The legs are the wheels of creativity.

Einstein, Albert

44.

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

45.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

46.

I do not seek, I find.

Picasso, Pablo

47.

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

48.

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

Saxe, John

49.

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

50.

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

Robin Green