Creativity Quotes

I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by a very early speech: 'Mama,' said I, 'I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

We must not imitate that which we seek to create.

~ Georges Braque

Using your talent, hobby or profession in a way that makes you cintribute with something good to this world is truly the way to go.

~ Simon Zingerman

Art isn't life, you know. It if were, the world would go up in flames. It's artifice. By definition.(Talking In The Dark)

~ Dennis Etchison

Why of course it's unlikely!' I said. 'Oh, by far!The awesome-est things in the world often are!

~ Al Yankovic

Soak blanket in gravy and make a delicious brick wrap. Serve in All Gravy Room at the Mandrake Hotel.

~ Christoph Fischer

Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad, it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I sometimes wonder whether the act of surrender is not one of the greatest of all - the highest. It is one of the [most] difficult of all... You see it's so immensely complicated. It needs real humility and at the same time, an absolute belief in one's own essential freedom. It is an act of faith. At the last moments, like all great acts, it is pure risk. This is true for me as a human being and as a writer. Dear Heaven, how hard it is to let go - to step into the blue. And yet one's creative life depends on it and one desires to do nothing else.

~ Katherine Mansfield

Edward Gibbon, in his classic work on the fall of the Roman Empire, describes the Roman era's declension as a place where bizarreness masqueraded as creativity.

~ Edward Gibbon

Hallo, Pooh,” said Rabbit.“Hallo, Rabbit,” said Pooh dreamily.“Did you make that song up?”“Well, I sort of made it up,” said Pooh. “It isn’t Brain,” he went on humbly, “because You Know Why, Rabbit; but it comes to me sometimes.”“Ah!” said Rabbit, who never let things come to him, but always went and fetched them.

~ A.a. Milne

Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Boredom is a lack of crazy. Its a lack of creativity. Invention. Innovation. If you're bored, blame yourself.

~ Katelyn S. Bolds

Even though artists of all kinds claim to put their hearts and souls into their works, it will only confuse you, for example, if you try to discern a painter by his paintings. His masterpiece may be the master because of its iridescence; it may display a hundred different perspectives through his single face.

~ Criss Jami

This was the sort of ebullience and élan I prayed for when I felt the desire to write. I used to sit down and wait for this to happen. But it never did happen- not this way. It happened afterwards, sometimes when I had left the machine and gone for a walk. Yes, suddenly it would come on, like an attack, pell-mell, from every direction, a veritable inundation, an avalanche- and there I was, helpless, miles away from the typewriter, not a piece of paper in my pocket.

~ Henry Miller

Work as if there's no one to help you, and learn as if everybody is with you.

~ Saransh Garg

Spiritual growth and creativity are two sides of the same coin.

~ Lada Ray

For years to come the debris of a convulsed world will beset our steps. It will require a purpose stronger than any man and worthy of all men to calm and inspirit us. A sane society whose riches are happy children, men and women, beautiful with peace and creative activity, is not going to be ordained for us. We must make it ourselves.

~ Helen Keller

Something went greatly wrong in our collective history and the starting point of it was the industrial revolution. Our school systems are focussed on a single objective: to produce model citizens for society in order to feed this machine and prevent its breakdown. That’s why our school systems have no interest in developing models that actually require and stimulate useful values in people, such as courage or imagination or inventiveness. None of these are taught in our schools, on the contrary the system focuses on memorizing. Memorizing is a way of overloading the mind with mental baggage it doesn’t really need. Besides being horribly dull and stiffening the effect of 20 years of abundant memorization training is modern man: an unimaginative creature stuffed with useless knowledge and unable to clean his mind of this information dirt: our school systems are purposely constructed to deliver mental automatons that are unable to think creatively.

~ Martijn Benders

I create, therefore I am.

~ Lada Ray

On Pilgrim's Progress: “I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colors.

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

God is the creator, so for that human creativity is a work of Divine.

~ Petra Remes

Economics itself offers a parallel that explains why this integration affects creativity. Clay Christensen has written about the “Innovator’s Dilemma”: the fact that large traditional firms find it rational to ignore new, breakthrough technologies that compete with their core business. The same analysis could help explain why large, traditional media companies will undermine our tradition of free culture. The property right that is copyright is no longer the balanced right that it was, or was intended to be. The property right that is copyright has become unbalanced, tilted toward an extreme. The opportunity to create and transform becomes weakened in a world in which creation requires permission and creativity must check with a lawyer.

~ Lawrence Lessig

We're all innately creative, I'm not bringing anything magical to it. Ninety percent of inventing is putting in the hours and just trying. You don't need to make a big leap—you - need to take a thousand small steps.

~ James Jorash

Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing... the rest will follow.

~ Jane Yolen

You receive a great number of rewards as soon as you begin creating something you dream of deep within your soul.

~ Marc Allen

People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on. There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.

~ Marie-Louise Von Franz

Ingenuity requires creativity.

~ Veronica Roth

For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is constantly ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking. He must create if he can, first and foremost, especially if his creation does not side-step the problems of his time.

~ Albert Camus

I’d stumbled upon the inner sanctuary of a woman who loved the world. Loved the faces of people she saw. Loved the way a hand looked when it was relaxed. Loved the way a woman looked when she touched her own face. The way a man looked when he opened himself to her. Loved the way wind changed a tree or a field or a child’s hair. The beauty of a neck meeting a shoulder. The softness of a smile that wasn’t forced.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

What we wish for, dream and imagine is the very framework and foundation of everything we create

~ Cynthia Sue Larson

Art was as much in the activity as in the results. Works of art were not just the finished product, but the thought, the action, the process that created them.

~ Jean M. Auel

All our contemporaries...had some big ideology to live for. Everybody thought he had to either fight in Spain or die for something else, and most of us had to be in prison for one reason or another. And then at the end it turns out that none of these great ideologies was worth your sacrificing anything for. Even doing personal good is very difficult to be absolutely sure about. It's very difficult to know exactly whether to live for an ideology or even to live for doing good. But there cannot be anything wrong in making a pot, I'll tell you. When making a pot you can't bring any evil into the world. - Eva Zeisel, ceramist.

~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Successful continual learning means maintaining a balance and variety of success-oriented attributes, the most prominent being awareness, confidence, persistence, determination, courage, and focus. But curiosity, ingenuity, and creativity may be even more important as it is these traits that fuel the desire to continue to question and challenge the status quo.

~ Lorii Myers

To make a real independent film where the filmmaker is in charge creatively, one must sacrifice personal, financial, and physical well-being.

~ Mark Polish

Reality shifts occur when we are in a dreamy state of energized awareness in which we are clear about what we prefer

~ Cynthia Sue Larson

When you're making something, you're in a different state. You go into a deep level of concentration, to the point where you're not self-conscious anymore, it's just flowing out of you.

~ David Rakoff

Venture deep into the wilderness of lost thought to the point that you physically shiver with apprehension, and there you will find creativity

~ Carl Henegan

The most creative approach is often the simple approach.

~ Phil Cooke

My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.

~ John Updike