Creativity - Quotes

A consistently highly creative person is generally irresponsible. - Theodore Levitt

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others. - Ayn Rand

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something. - Frank Capra 

A requirement of creativity is that it contributes to change. Creativity keeps the creator alive. - Frank Herbert

Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art. -  John Fitzgerald Kennedy

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. - Edwin Land

Artists know that there is no creativity without a system of formal restraints. - Kathy Galloway

Away with all ideals. Let each individual act spontaneously from the forever incalculable prompting of the creative wellhead within him. There is no universal law. - D. H. Lawrence

Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself. - Alan Alda

Before he can create, man must have a deep awareness of the world about him. - Harold A. Rothbart

Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing. - Eric Hoffer

Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born every day; to feel a sense of self. - Erich Fromm

Confusion is the welcome mat at the door of creativity. - Michael J. Gelb

Create or perish is the eternal mandate of nature. Be constructive or become frustrated is an equal demand. You cannot escape the conclusion that whatever this thing is which is seeking expression through everything, it can find satisfactory outlet only through constructive and life-giving creativeness. - Ernest Holmes

Creation, to me, is to try to orchestrate the universe to understand what surrounds us. Even if, to accomplish that, we use all sorts of stratagems which in the end prove completely incapable of staving off chaos. - Peter Greenaway

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual. - Arthur Koestler

Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty. - Anne Lamott

Creative life is characterized by spontaneous mutability; it brings forth unknown issues, impossible to preconceive. - D. H. Lawrence

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training. - Anna Freud

Creative people have an abiding curiosity and an insatiable desire to learn how and why things work. They take nothing for granted. They are interested in things around them and tend to stow away bits and pieces of information in their minds for the future use. And they have a great ability to mobilize their thinking and experiences for use in solving a new problem. - Bill Hewlett

Creative thinking may simply mean the realization that there is no particular virtue in doing things the way they have always been done. - Rudolph Flesch

Creative thinking is not a talent, it is a skill that can be learnt. - Edward de Bono

Creative thinking – in terms of idea creativity – is not a mystical talent. It is a skill that can be practised and nurtured. - Edward de Bono

Creative people are all there, totally immersed, fascinated and absorbed in the present, in the current situation, in the here-now, with the matter-in-hand. - Abraham Maslow

Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place. - Carl Gustaf Jung

Creativity ... consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. - George Kneller

Creativity ... is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea. - Lou Dorfsman

Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties. - Gail Sheehy

Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas. - Donatella Versace

Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience. - Masaru Ibuka

Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work. - Rita Mae Brown

Creativity does not derive from order but from the attempt to impose order where it does not exist, to make new connections. - Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Creativity flourishes when we have a sense of safety and self-acceptance. - Julie Cameron

Creativity follows its own rules. - Brian Herbert & Kevin J Anderson

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

Creativity is a characteristic given to all human beings at birth. - Abraham Maslow

Creativity is a conceptual, abstracted system. It is not tangible, but many of its products are. Creative people work in the tangible world, producing real products. - William G. Covington, Jr

Creativity is a condition of our species. We invent procedures, alter behaviours, develop new systems, and create new knowledge to increase our likelihood of survival and fulfillment. Human creativity is an extension or another expression of our biological imperative to procreate. - Marci Segal

Creativity is a consequence of action, not its motivation. Do what needs to be done and then ask whether it was possible. - Wade Davis

Creativity is a matter of life and death for any society. - Arnold Toynbee

Creativity is a potent element of individual life experience and is the soil at the root of much of human progress and endeavour.  - Michael A. West

Creativity is a puzzle, a paradox, some say a mystery. Inventors, scientists, and artists rarely know how their ideas arise. They mention intuition, but cannot say how it works. Most psychologists cannot tell us much about it either. What's more, many people assume that there will never be a scientific theory of creativity--for how could science possibly explain fundamental novelties? As if all this were not daunting enough, the apparent unpredictability of creativity seems to outlaw any systemic explanation whether scientific or historical. - Margaret Boden

Creativity is a stimulant to growth. - Danny Cox

Creativity is intelligence having fun. - Albert Einstein

Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual. - Arthur Koestler

Creativity is an area in which younger people have a tremendous advantage, since they have an endearing habit of always questioning past wisdom and authority. - Bill Hewlett

Creativity is an incremental process – the instant Big Idea does not exist. - Andy Green

Creativity is discontent translated into arts. - Eric Hoffer

Creativity is discovering the elegant patterns of meaning across diverse areas of our knowledge and experience. - Michael A. West

Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. In is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea. - Arthur C. Clarke

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

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences than other people. - Steve Jobs

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity. - Charles Mingus

Creativity is more than mere imagination. It is imagination inseparably coupled with both intent and effort. - Alex Osborn

Creativity is never just doing something different. It is doing something different that is significant at that precise point in the cultural tradition. - Mark Amsler

Creativity is no less challenging or exciting when the mystery is stripped from the creative process. The most beautiful flowers grow under careful cultivation from common soil. - Herbert Simon

Creativity is not simply a property of exceptional people but an exceptional property of all people. - Ron Carter

Creativity is not simply originality and unlimited freedom. There is much more to it than that. Creativity also imposes restrictions. While it uses methods other than those of ordinary thinking, it must not be in disagreement with ordinary thinking--or rather, it must be something that, sooner or later, ordinary thinking will understand, accept, and appreciate. Otherwise the result would be bizarre, not creative. - Sylvan Arieti

Creativity is not to be located in one state of mind, one room, one type of person, one individual. Rather it lies in the transition points between different ways of thinking. If we close the doors, we will never hear the full story. - Chris Bilton

Creativity is one of the main foundations on which human progress is built up. - A. N. P. Ummerkutty

Creativity is one of the most positive, life-affirming traits of humanity, and people in all walks of life report that they feel at their peak and in flow when they are being their most creative. - Robert Keith Sawyer

Creativity is purposeful and involves effort to make something work, to make something better, more meaningful, or more beautiful. - Alane J. Starko

Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud. Any of us put out more and better ideas if our efforts are truly appreciated. - Alex Osborn

Creativity is that delicate combination of elements that result in new ideas and innovations. - Alfreda Doyle

Creativity is the ability to see relationships where none exist. - Thomas Disch

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature. - Eric Hoffer

Creativity is the defeat of habit by imposing originality and change. - Andy Law

Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level. - A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Creativity is the marvellous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition. - Max Ernst

Creativity is the spark of life, the vitality that stirs desires to improve and change the status quo – meaningfully, responsibly, wisely, and with impact. - Marci Segal

Creativity is the steam that powers the locomotive of progress. - Danny Cox

Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things. - Theodore Levitt

Creativity means learning where the rules exist, and then breaking them! Saying, "It's better this way." But you have to know the rules in order to break them with any grace. - Alan Arkin

Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. - Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

Creativity perpetually invents itself. - Paul Palnik

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. - Erich Fromm

Creativity varies inversely with the number of cooks involved in the broth. - Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

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. - George Kneller

Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people. - Leo Burnett

Diversity is a great force towards creativity. - Michael Eisner

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction. - Pablo Picasso

Every creative act requires elimination and simplification. Simplification results from a realization of what is essential. - Unknown

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. - Isaac Bashevis Singer

Every really good creative person in advertising has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject he could not easily get interested in...Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk. - James Webb Young

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labour in freedom. - Albert Einstein

For creativity to flourish [requires] the embrace of loss, the oldest and most constant of human experiences. - Julie Burstein

Human creativity uses what is already existing and available and changes it in unpredictable ways. Sylavano Arieti

Human life is inherently creative. It's why we all have different resumes. It's why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic. - Ken Robinson

If the individual is narrowly concentrated on the goal, to the exclusion of other relevant aspects of the problem situation, he is often unable to achieve a solution. The creative thinker must stand sufficiently detached from his work. -  Mary Henle

If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk. - Unknown

If you ask me, what is helpful to creativity is training the eye to notice things, to observe closely and precisely, being careful not to make a muddle of it. - Ian Graham

If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play. John Cleese

If you would be more creative stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society. - Jean Piaget

If you would create something, you must be something. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In creating, the only hard thing’s to begin. - James Russell Lowell

In the creative state, a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art. - E. M. Forster

It is only the phenomenon of creativity which separates man from machines and animals. - A Reza Arasteh & J. D. Arasteh

It is the tension between creativity and scepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science. - Carl Sagan

It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. - Virginia Woolf

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

It seems to be one of the paradoxes of creativity that in order to think originally, we must familiarize ourselves with the ideas of others. - George Kneller

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that is creativity. - Charles Mingus

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given. - Anton Chekhov

Man is a creative animal, doomed to strive toward a goal, engaged in full-time engineering. -  Fyodor Dostoevsky

Man owes his success to his creativity. No one doubts the need for it. It is most useful in good times and essential in bad.  - Edward de Bono

Man unites himself with the world in the process of creation. - Erich Fromm

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

No matter how old you get, if you keep the desire to be create, you are keeping the man-child alive. - John Cassavetes

Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in art, in music, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. - John Steinbeck

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. - Jean Houston

People must know that their ideas will be listened to and, if they have merit, acted upon. If they do, it is possible to mobilize individual creativity on a very broad scale. - James Champy

That which is creative must create itself. - John Keats

The ability to relate and to connect, sometimes in an odd and yet striking fashion, lies at the very heart of any creative use of the mind, no matter in what field or discipline. - George J. Seidel 

The art of creation is older than the art of killing. - Andrei Voznesensky

The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense. - Pablo Picasso

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 objects it loves. - Carl Gustav Jung

The creative consequences of man's imaginative strivings may never make him whole; but they constitute his deepest consolations and his greatest glories. - Anthony Starr

The creative habit is like a drug. - Henry Moore

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. Your have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself. - Alan Alda

The creative man with an insight into human nature, with the artistry to touch and move people, will succeed. Without them he will fail. - Bill Bernabach

The creative mind doesn't have to have the whole pattern - it can have just a little piece and be able to envision the whole picture in completion. - Art Fry

The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person. - Frank Barron

The creative person is willing to live with ambiguity. He doesn't need problems solved immediately and can afford to wait for the right ideas. - Abe Tannenbaum

The creative person pays close attention to what appears discordant and contradictory and is challenged by such irregularities. - Frank Barron

The creative person prefers the richness of the disordered to the stark barrenness of the simple. - Donald W. MacKinnon

The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things-ancient history, nineteenth century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later, or six months, or six years. But he has faith that it will happen. - Carl Ally

The creative process is also the most terrifying part because you don't know exactly what's going to happen or where it is going to lead. You don't know what new dangers and challenges you'll find. It takes an enormous amount of internal security to begin with the spirit of adventure, discovery, and creativity. Without doubt, you have to leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness. - Stephen Covey

The creative process shrivels in the absence of continual dialogue with the soul. And creativity is what makes life worth living. - Marion Woodman

The fear of being wrong is the prime inhibitor of the creative process. - Roberta Jean Bryant

The genuine creator creates something that has a life of its own, something that can exist and function without him. - Eric Hoffer

The great successful men of the world have used their imagination ... they think ahead and create their mental picture, and then go to work materializing that picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building, steadily building. - Robert Collier

The important thing is to create. Nothing else matters; creation is all. - Pablo Picasso

The legs are the wheels of creativity. - Albert Einstein

The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy, man’s tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities. By this I mean the organic and human life, the urge to expand, extend, develop, mature – the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, or the self. - Carl Rogers

The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind. - Albert Einstein

The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capacities and talents. - Eric Hoffer

The organization that can develop a culture of creativity and idea generation will be the winners. - Kevin Roberts

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it. - Edward Albee

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein

The things we fear most in organizations – fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances – are the primary sources of creativity. - Margaret J. Wheatley

The trick to creativity, if there is a single, useful thing to say about it, is to identify your own particular talent and then settle down to work with it for a good long time. - Denise Shekerjian

The true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note. - Igor Stravinsky

The truly creative person is one who can think crazy; such a person knows full well that many of his great ideas will prove to be worthless. The creative person is flexible; he is able to change as the situation changes, to break habits, to face indecision and changes in conditions without undue stress. He is not threatened by the unexpected as rigid, inflexible people are. - Frank Goble

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions. - Anthony Jay

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it. - Carl Rogers

The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way. - Eric Hoffer

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. - Sylvia Plath

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 the same patterns. - Edward de Bon

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. - Henri Bergson

To give a fair chance to potential creativity is a matter of life and death for any society. - Arnold Toynbe

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. - Joseph Chilton Pierce

To me, creativity is a vision and the actualization of that vision. This vision is a unit; it is complete and pregnant. Just as night gives birth to day, the seed to a plant, an ovum to a child; so too a creative vision gives birth indefinitely and its actualization produces scientific, artistic or religious forms. - A. Reza Arasteh

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science. - Albert Einstein

To retain the simple playfulness of childhood through one's riper years is what opens a person up to the creative possibilities within a situation. - Denise Shekerjian

To the creative individual all experience is seminal - all events are equidistant from new ideas and insights. - Eric Hoffer

To stimulate creativity, one must develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition. - Albert Einstein

Too academic an education can inhibit the workings of the creative mind. - Margaret Drabble

True creativity often starts where language ends. - Arthur Kostler

Very few people do anything creative after the age of thirty-five. The reason is that very few people do anything creative before the age of thirty-five. -  Joel Hildebrand

We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but does not know what to create. Lord of all things, he is not lord of himself. - José Ortega Y Gasset

What are the conditions of the creative attitude, of seeing and responding, of being aware and being sensitive to what one is aware of? First of all it requires the capacity to be puzzled. - Erich Fromm

What is not constrained is not creative. - Philip Johnson-Laird

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem. - Brian Aldiss

When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation. - Margaret Sackville

When truly creative people come up with a new idea, they do not reject it immediately because of its flaws. They play with it, looking for strengths and sliding over weaknesses. - David Campbell

When we engage in what we are naturally suited to do, our work takes on the quality of play and it is play that stimulates creativity. - Linda Naiman

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. - Harold Rosenberg

Without freedom, there is no creation. - Jiddu Krishnamurti

You can always make up in creativity what you lack in good fortune. Playing the game of life is like playing poker. Playing three aces badly won't get you as far as playing a terrible hand well. - Ernie J. Zelinski

You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. - Maya Angelou

You don’t get creative by staying in the same place. - Andy Law