Creativity Quotes

My mom told me once that Wyatt loved her the way a boy will love his mother, but I loved her the way an artist loves another. Jo taught me what that meant.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Art gives its vision to beauty not always recognized. And it surrenders freely -- whatever power it possesses to every sincere soul that seeks it. But above all else--it presents us with the gift of ourselves.

~ Aberjhani

Look at this one.” I picked up a small painting of a man with dark hair and a short, dark beard. He wore a loose shirt, cobalt blue, unbuttoned at the top, showing a prominent, knobby collarbone. He looked…complicated and hungry. She’d captured him focused intensely on a book, his face pressed against a wall like he was resting. Or waiting.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Those who loved with all their heart and mind and might have always thought of death, and those who knew the endless nights of harrowing concern for others have longed for it. The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worthwhile and death welcome. There is no other life I should prefer. Neither should I like not to die. (The Faith of a Heretic)

~ Walter Kaufmann

To express open creativity, you first need to create your own space of seclusion.

~ Anthony Liccione

Something terrible happens to people who don't create, something poisonous. Creating is a necessity for all humans, like breathing. If you don't do it, you suffer.

~ K.a. Laity

Sometimes broken hearts are needed, that way you will appreciate the one that handles it with care.

~ Lilly Ghalichi

I worried I would miss it, and I knew, from losing Wyatt, that things happen the moment the soul is released. Wyatt had been there in the school, watching me, making sure I survived. Souls linger…they do. They linger a bit before they turn toward eternity. It could be that no matter how perfect their future will be, the past still tugs for a moment.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Jo told me once that she was an old woman everywhere but in her studio. “There I’m only myself,” she’d said. Standing in the middle of masterpieces that only Jo had ever seen and touched, I knew what she meant.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

I am a creator, writing like the wind, I carry the weight of a future world in the barrel of a pen, etching my characters into the paper with life giving ink so my dreams and reality might finally meet.

~ L.m. Fields

God chose to introduce Himself to us in the first verse of Genesis as a Creator. And yet so few Christians really understand the power of creativity to influence the culture.

~ Phil Cooke

If we weren’t already doing it this way, is this the way we would start?

~ Paul Depodesta

Great art comes from passion, from a need to expose human spirit in the face of mortality, the small cruelties and heroisms that make up daily life -- that's where great work comes from, and if you enable students in this way to discover those impulses and observations in themselves, those heroisms and cruelties in themselves, you create an atmosphere in which art can emerge.

~ Deb Margolis

I can certainly throw out some observation about the process of creating which may be of use. Firstly, it's the best & the worst of worlds, because the only fuel you have to make the fire blaze on the page / screen is the stuff of your own being. An artist consumes his or herself in the act of making art. I can feel that consumption even now, sitting here at my desk at the end of a working day. In order to generate the ideas that I have set on the page for the last 10 or 11 hours I have burned the fuel of my own history. This is, obviously a double-edged sword. In order to give, the artist must take from himself. That's the deal. And it's very important to me that the work I do is the best I can make it, because I know what is being burned up to create. As the villain of Sacrament says: living & dying, we feed the fire.

~ Clive Barker

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

~ Steven Pressfield

The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.

~ Steven Pressfield

I'd say I never considered myself a great architect. I'm more of a creative problem solver with good taste and a soft spot for logistical nightmares.

~ Maria Semple

I could write about how I feel when I sing, write and create something from heartbreak, sorrow, sadness or just simply nothingness. How nothingness can become the most beautiful, unexplainable feeling that makes you forget about gravity for an hour.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

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

~ Terry Tempest Williams

Where the Divine and the Human Meet shows how important it is to meet the world with the creativity of an artist, particularly in these uncertain times: What do we do with chaos? Creativity has an answer. We are told by those who have studied the processes of nature that creativity happens at the border between chaos and order. Chaos is a prelude to creativity. We need to learn, as every artist needs to learn, to live with chaos and indeed to dance with it as we listen to it and attempt some ordering. Artists wrestle with chaos, take it apart, deconstruct and reconstruct from it. Accept the challenge to convert chaos into some kind of order, respecting the timing of it all, not pushing beyond what is possible—combining holy patience with holy impatience--that is the role of the artist. It is each of our roles as we launch the twenty-first century because we are all called to be artists in our own way. We were all artists as children. We need to study the chaos around us in order to turn it into something beautiful. Something sustainable. Something that remains.

~ Matthew Fox

We are not consumers. For most of humanity’s existence, we were makers, not consumers: we made our clothes, shelter, and education, we hunted and gathered our food.We are not addicts. “I propose that most addictions come from our surrendering our real powers, that is, our powers of creativity.” We are not passive couch potatoes either. “It is not the essence of humans to be passive. We are players. We are actors on many stages…. We are curious, we are yearning to wonder, we are longing to be amazed… to be excited, to be enthusiastic, to be expressive. In short to be alive.” We are also not cogs in a machine. To be so would be to give up our personal freedoms so as to not upset The Machine, whatever that machine is. Creativity keeps us creating the life we wish to live and advancing humanity’s purpose as well.

~ Matthew Fox

I believe in always being open to learning more through exploration of everything available and following one's sense of curiosity, creativity, and playfulness.

~ Jay Woodman

Flexibility is a requirement for survival.

~ Roger Von Oech

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.

~ Albert Camus

The creative impulse can be killed, but it cannot be taught...What a teacher can do...in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn. As far as I'm concerned, this providing of oxygen is one of the noblest of all vocations.

~ Madeleine L'engle

It's difficult to get your creative juices flowing if you're always being practical, following rules, afraid to make mistakes, not looking into outside areas, or under the influence of any of the other mental locks.

~ Roger Von Oech

Tomorrow is no hazardous affair, a day like any other day: tomorrow is the result of many yesterdays and comes with a potent, cumulative effect. I am tomorrow what I chose to be yesterday and the day before. It is not possible that tomorrow I may negate and nullify everything that led me to this present moment.

~ Henry Miller

There is nothing higher-class than real craftsmanship, diversity, originality and the service of skilled human hands.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Creation's probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Creativity and passion dwindle when hungry. Premiums for talent are easier to demand when desperation isn’t part of the equation. If I’m established, I can demand $350 an hour. If I’m desperate, I may accept $5.

~ John-Talmage Mathis

P.S. It's not schizophrenia, it's creativity, there is a difference. My voices go away after I let them tell their stories.

~ Ashley Newell

Creativity is the greatest expression of liberty.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.

~ Pat Conroy

where does creativity come from? Creativity comes from the Universe itself. “There is music and poetry in the Universe itself — surely we hear it on planet earth.” And Creativity comes from our joys and sorrows, our deep-hearted experiences. It also comes “from and in the heart of God. All our spiritual traditions the world over agree that creativity follows through the human heart and that it flows from the Divine Heart.”Creativity is seen as a spiritual, inwardly-driven activity, directly influenced by a Higher Power, or God. That is the ultimate in inspiration for me: to know I have “permission” to be creative and to be a creator too.

~ Matthew Fox

Life is a cracked surface at best. Fiction is a nice edifice. / every word/sentence/paragraph gives a writer an opportunity to reinforce or deliberately crack the edifice by screwing with meaning, structure, grammar, the fourth wall, etc. / different types and degrees of cracking produce different arrangements of order and chaos.

~ K.j. Bishop

What does one do with experience? Do we react negatively, or do we (pro)create from the space of positivity?

~ T.f. Hodge

What if your art could provide everything you ever needed or wanted in life?

~ Patti Digh

If you're alive, you're creative.

~ Patti Digh

The audacity of my sagacity is instrumentality to my successity.

~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Sometimes time spent reinventing the wheel results in a revolutionary new rolling device. But sometimes it just amounts to time spent reinventing the wheel.

~ Steve Krug