Motivational Quotes

Creativity

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

Best Quotes about Creativity

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

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

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.

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

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

Cook, Mary Lou

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

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

Asch, Sholem

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

Aldiss, Brian

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

10.

Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.

Cecil B. DeMille

11.

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

Valery, Paul

12.

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

Fromm, Erich

13.

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

Bono, Edward De

14.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

15.

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

Land, Edwin H.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Persius

22.

Sarton, May

23.

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

Alfonso X

24.

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

25.

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

Bennett, Arnold

26.

Genius is initiative on fire.

Jackson, George Holbrook

27.

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

Artaud, Antonin

28.

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

29.

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

Browder, Charles

30.

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

Kroc, Ray

31.

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

32.

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

Lee, Bruce

33.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

34.

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

35.

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

Jampolsky, Gerald G.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

To create something you must be something.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

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

41.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

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

Wheatley, Margaret J.

43.

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

Robin Green

44.

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.

45.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Fromm, Erich

46.

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

George Lois

47.

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

48.

I do not seek, I find.

Picasso, Pablo

49.

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.

50.

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