Creativity Quotes

With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. Connoissers admire the skill (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the quality of painting (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away. The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures nice or splendid. Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing.

~ Wassily Kandinsky

Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators

~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The boys were amazed that I could make such a poem as that out of my own head, and so was I, of course, it being as much a surprise to me as it could be to anybody, for I did not know that it was in me. If any had asked me a single day before if it was in me, I should have told them frankly no, it was not.That is the way with us; we may go on half of our life not knowing such a thing is in us, when in reality it was there all the time, and all we needed was something to turn up that would call for it.

~ Mark Twain

Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.

~ Marcus Valerius Martialis

It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry -- if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep on working until the work is done. Woody Allen famously declared that eighty percent of success is showing up. NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) teaches kids how to show up again and again.

~ Jonah Lehrer

The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours,' [T.S.] Eliot wrote. 'But less talent was wasted.

~ Jonah Lehrer

Writing and drawing are very therapeutic, but they are also an excellent manifestation tool. I teach my clients to draw what they want, or to write a story about it to bring the manifestation forward into the present.

~ Alice Mccall

If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.

~ Piaget

At least I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it.

~ Brenda Ueland

The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started in the creation of the work. In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness. When a simile takes us aback and persuades us together, when we find a juxtaposition in a picture both odd and intriguing, when a theory is at once fresh and convincing, we do not merely nod over someone else's work. We re-enact the creative act, and we ourselves make the discovery again......Reality is not an exhibit for man's inspection, labeled: Do not touch. There are no appearances to be photographed, no experiences to be copied, in which we do not take part. We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.

~ Jacob Bronowski

Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up.

~ David Rakoff

I hate being a writer. i tend to stick my emotions in things that cannot reciprocate. I've become a whore for my craft.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

...Why are corporations so fleeting?...Instead of imitating the freewheeling city, these businesses minimize the very interactions that lead to new ideas. They erect walls and establish hierarchies. They keep people from relaxing and having insights. They stifle conversations, discourage dissent, and suffocate social networks. Rather than maximizing employee creativity they become obsessed with minor efficiencies.

~ Jonah Lehrer

The vocational approach at NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) helps build grit in students. It teaches them how to be single-minded in pursuit of a goal, to sacrifice for the sake of a passion. The teachers demand hard work from their kids because they know, from personal experience, that creative success requires nothing less.

~ Jonah Lehrer

Fear and self-doubt are the deadly enemies of creativity. Don’t invite either into your mind.

~ Don Roff

The most beautiful work of art that we can create is this life.

~ Kristi Bowman

Creativity and ideas fired between every synapse underneath my skin and I felt radiant from the inside out.

~ Belinda Jeffrey

I am the wood frame, the bundle of ox hair, and the creative spark... my value unhangable.

~ Marina Leigh Hatfield

One with true creativity can erase their one past, and replace it with an infinite number of pasts, creating new possibilities for the future.

~ Lionel Suggs

If you knew all about it, it wouldn't be the leading edge.

~ Karl H. Pribram

There is nothing in the world which an artist cannot recreate into something poetic, ennobling. And why do we read these things? They are not facts, they do not improve our business skills, our techniques in manufacturing goods, the management of a home. That is what most of you will be doing anyway. We read these because they teach us about people, we can see ourselves in them, in their problems. And by seeing ourselves in them, we clarify ourselves, we explain ourselves to ourselves, so we can live with ourselves…

~ F. Sionil José

Purpose stirs creativity, without purpose you life will be in abnormal use(abuse).

~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

This book began with the assertion that Margaret Fuller's life was her most remarkable creation. It is just possible, however, that her most wonderful creations may still lie in the future. Fuller's most precious gift to us may reside in the ideas and the works, still yet to be imagined, of women and men who follow her example. We may decide that, despite all that Margaret Fuller endured and suffered in order to become exceptional, her life, or rather her lives, well deserve imitating.

~ John Matteson

Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

~ Steven Pressfield

Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.

~ Albert Einstein

We are never more creative than when we are at odds with the world and there is nothing so artistically destructive as comfort. Princess Leia taught me that.

~ Simon Pegg

Truly creative people care little about what they have done, and a lot about what they are doing.

~ Alan Cohen

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

~ Thomas Mann

To tell you the truth, though, I still haven't made up my mind whether I shall publish at all. Tastes differ so widely, and some people are so humourless, so uncharitable, and so absurdly wrong-headed, that one would probably do far better to relax and enjoy life than worry oneself to death trying to instruct or entertain a public which will only despise one's efforts, or at least feel no gratitude for them.

~ Thomas More

In strange and uncertain times such as those we are living in, sometimes a reasonable person might despair. But hope is unreasonable and love is greater even than this. May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse.

~ Robert Fripp

The only way to maximize group creativity—to make the whole more than the sum of its parts—is to encourage a candid discussion of mistakes. In part, this is because the acceptance of error reduces cost. When you believe your flaws will be quickly corrected by the group, you're less worried about perfecting your contribution, which leads to a more candid conversation. We can only get it right when we talk about what we got wrong.

~ Jonah Lehrer

She has given me a way out.

~ Alison Bechdel

It is a burden...(M)ake no mistake about that. Any great gift or power or talent is a burden and this more than any, and you will long to be free of it. But there is nothing to be done. If you were born with the gift, then you must serve it, and nothing in this world or out of it may stand in the way of that service, because that is why you were born and that is the Law.- Susan Cooper (Merriman The Dark is Rising)

~ Susan Cooper

If it aint broke, break it. Then build something better.

~ Jonathan Culver

We create our own reality. The blessing (or problem) with this is that when one creates one's own reality, one must live it! Are you living a blessing or is it a curse?

~ Gary R. Ryan

A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.

~ Anthony Burgess

It is the artist who tries to gradually accustom people to the possibilities of a better state of things.

~ Catherine Amy Dawson Scott

The trick, of course, is to lose one day and come back to win the next. But that is possible only when we draw healthy pleasure and confidence from our creative processes.

~ John H. Lienhard

Creativity is a delicious dream from which I never want to awake.

~ K. Ford K.

In fact, most of us see perseverance as a distinctly uncreative approach, the sort of strategy that people with mediocre ideas are forced to rely on.

~ Jonah Lehrer