Motivational Quotes

Creativity

The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.

- Picasso, Pablo

Best Quotes about Creativity

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

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

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

Browder, Charles

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

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

Land, Edwin H.

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

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

Artaud, Antonin

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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

10.

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

11.

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

Frank Thomas

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Sting

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

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

Alfonso X

19.

Creation is a drug I can't do without.

Mille, Cecil B. De

20.

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

21.

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

22.

I do not seek, I find.

Picasso, Pablo

23.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

25.

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.

26.

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

Cook, Mary Lou

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Lee, Bruce

31.

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

Fromm, Erich

32.

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

Robin Green

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

Land, Edwin H.

36.

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

Sandburg, Carl

37.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

38.

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

Jampolsky, Gerald G.

39.

To create something you must be something.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

43.

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

44.

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

Bono, Edward De

45.

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

46.

Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.

Cecil B. DeMille

47.

True creativity often starts where language ends.

Koestler, Arthur

48.

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

George Lois

49.

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.

50.

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

Mille, Agnes De