Creativity Quotes

I believe that true identity is found . . . in creative activity springing from within. It is found, paradoxically, when one loses oneself. Woman can best refind herself in some kind of creative activity of her own.

~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Uncertainty is a quality to be cherished, therefore – if not for it, who would dare to undertake anything?

~ Villiers De L'isle-Adam

We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.

~ Dave Eggers

... all too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own.[2002] p.46

~ Gary Hamel

I'm interested in the moment when two objects collide and generate a third. The third object is where the interesting work is.

~ Bruce Mau

I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.

~ Criss Jami

The conventional mind is passive - it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The dimensional mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.

~ Robert Greene

Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.

~ Edward Abbey

Given the freedom to create, everybody is creative. All of us have an innate, instinctive desire to change our environment, to put our original stamp on this world, to tell a story never told before. I’m absolutely thrilled at the moment of creativity – when suddenly I’ve synthesized my experiences, reality, and my imagination into something entirely new. But most people are too busy working on survival to find the opportunity to create. Fortunately, I’ve been freed by reputation, by the economics of success, and by emotional contentment to turn my ideas into reality. I’ve discovered that the more freedom I have to be creative, the more creative I become.

~ William Shatner

Rules are a great way to get ideas. All you have to do is break them.

~ Jack Foster

Creative people, especially those who are just starting out, feel that they have to conform and be a mass-produced product in order to be noticed. The truth of the matter is that genuineness and unconventionality is often what helps make a mark on the world.

~ Veronika Carnaby

For the person with creative potential there is no wholeness except in using it.

~ Robert K. Greenleaf

GOOD IDEAS ALTER THE BALANCE IN RELATIONSHIPS. THAT IS WHY GOOD IDEAS ARE ALWAYS INITIALLY RESISTED.

~ Hugh Macleod

Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.

~ Rollo May

After joyfully working each morning, I would leave off around midday to challenge myself to a footrace. Speeding along the sunny paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg, ideas would breed like aphids in my head—for creative invention is easy and sublime when air cycles quickly through the lungs and the body is busy at noble tasks.

~ Roman Payne

Does it not occur to people that I might be artificial by nature?

~ Maurice Ravel

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.

~ Gustave Flaubert

It often feels like a tremendous amount of work is required to get an idea moving forward, like pushing a train uphill. But at a certain point, the thing takes on its own momentum, and takes unexpected turns. So it's that feeling of holding on, rather than pushing it, that is the most exciting thing. It's that need to occasionally bounce off the walls, letting anything happen for any reason, and having nothing to guide you that is the joy.

~ Danny Elfman

You have to be emotionally attached to what you are doing.

~ Brad Bird

**New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.**That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision.[first-line bold by author][2002] p.23

~ Gary Hamel

If I ever conceive any original idea, it will be because I have been abnormally prone to confuse ideas ... and I have thus found remote analogies and relations which others have not considered! Others rarely make these confusions, and proceed by precise analysis.

~ Kenneth J.w. Craik

Humor and paradox are often the only ways to respond to life's sorrow with grace.

~ Matthew Fox

There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.

~ Edward De Bono

There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every creative story is different. And every creative story is the same. There was nothing. Now there is something. It's almost like magic.

~ Jonah Lehrer

The ideas are louder when there are fewer of them.

~ David C. Day

Critique by creating.

~ Michelangelo Buonarroti

Even when alternative views are clearly wrong, being exposed to them still expands our creative potential. In a way, the power of dissent is the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer, we work to understand it, which causes us to reassess our initial assumptions and try out new perspectives. “Authentic dissent can be difficult, but it’s always invigorating,” [Charlan] Nemeth [a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley] says. “It wakes us right up.

~ Jonah Lehrer

We have one precious life: do something extraordinary today, even if it's tiny. A pebble starts the avalanche.

~ K.a. Laity

If we allow our high creativity to remain alive, we will never be bored. We can pray, standing in line at the super market. Or we can be lost in awe at all the people around us, their lives full of glory and tragedy, and suddenly we will have the beginnings of a painting, a story, a song.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Imagination is not an icing on the cake of life but the oven in which it is baked.

~ Orna Ross

Creativity is a talent we inherit from God.

~ Kim Chestney

I'm a bit of a night owl because that's when I feel the most creative and alive.

~ Christina Aguilera

The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind.However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity.---- Afterword to Hothouse Brian Aldiss

~ Brian W. Aldiss

To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted

~ George Keller

The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer

~ Alfred De Musset

There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not “decorate” it; she infused it.

~ Michael Chabon

The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds

~ Alfred De Vigny

In the white man's world, language, too -- and the way which the white man thinks of it--has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace. On every side of him there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in on him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language -- for the Word itself -- as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word.

~ N. Scott Momaday