Motivational Quotes

Creativity

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

- Sandburg, Carl

Best Quotes about Creativity

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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

Mille, Agnes De

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

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

Lee, Bruce

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

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

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

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

10.

I do not seek, I find.

Picasso, Pablo

11.

Genius is initiative on fire.

Jackson, George Holbrook

12.

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

Saxe, John

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

The legs are the wheels of creativity.

Einstein, Albert

17.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Alfonso X

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

True creativity often starts where language ends.

Koestler, Arthur

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Robin Green

28.

Creation is a drug I can't do without.

Mille, Cecil B. De

29.

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

Jampolsky, Gerald G.

30.

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

31.

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

Land, Edwin H.

32.

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

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.

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

Sting

35.

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

Sandburg, Carl

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.

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

Bennett, Arnold

38.

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

Eric A. Burns

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

43.

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

44.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

45.

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

Aldiss, Brian

46.

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Koestler, Arthur

47.

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

48.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

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

Sackville, Margaret

50.

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