Motivational Quotes

Creativity

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

Best Quotes about Creativity

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

Sting

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

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

Miller, Henry

I do not seek, I find.

Picasso, Pablo

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.

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

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

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.

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

George, Gilbert

15.

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

Valery, Paul

16.

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

17.

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

Asch, Sholem

18.

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

19.

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

Browder, Charles

20.

The legs are the wheels of creativity.

Einstein, Albert

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Cook, Mary Lou

24.

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

George Lois

25.

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

26.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

Land, Edwin H.

31.

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

Artaud, Antonin

32.

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

Frank Thomas

33.

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

34.

To create something you must be something.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.

Picasso, Pablo

36.

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

Caesar, Julius

37.

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

Bono, Edward De

38.

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

Lee, Bruce

39.

Creation is a drug I can't do without.

Mille, Cecil B. De

40.

Genius is initiative on fire.

Jackson, George Holbrook

41.

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

42.

Frugality without creativity is deprivation.

Amy Dacyczyn

43.

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

Twain, Mark

44.

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

Land, Edwin H.

45.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

46.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Sandburg, Carl