Quotes on Creativity

2
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.”
– Carl Sagan

3
“What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.”
– John Updike

4
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
– Charles H. Duell

5
“The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”
– Albert Einstein

6
“No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.”
– Oscar Wilde

7
“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.”
– Linus Pauling

8
“Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.”
– Carl Jung

9
“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
– Aristotle

10
“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.”
– Pablo Picasso

11
“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

12
“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”
– David Lynch

13
“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.”
– John Locke

14
“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”
– John Dewey

15
“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.”
– Henry Ward Beecher [Tweet]

16
“Most important ideas take a long time to evolve and they spend a long time dormant in the background…hunches need to collide with other hunches.”
– Steven Johnson

17
“Creativity is the ability to illustrate what is outside the box from within the box.”
– Anonymous

18
“Trust that little voice in your head that says ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if..’ and then do it.”
– Duane Michals

19
“The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done – men who are creative, inventive and discoverers.”
– Jean Piaget

20
“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”
– Erich Fromm

21
“Necessity is the mother of invention, it is true, but its father is creativity, and knowledge is the midwife.”
– Jonathan Schattke

22
“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.”
– Theodore Levitt

23
“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.”
– John Cage

24
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
– Joseph Chilton Pearce

25
“Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives . . . most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity . . . when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.”
– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

26
“There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

27
“A major stimulant to creative thinking is focused questions. There is something about a well-worded question that often penetrates to the heart of the matter and triggers new ideas and insights.”
– Brian Tracy

28
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
– Scott Adams

29
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
– Steve Jobs

30
“There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.”
– Pablo Picasso

31
“Creativity is whatever isn’t something else.”
– Peter Shillingsburg

32
“If at first, the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it.”
– Albert Einstein

33
“The key question isn’t ‘What fosters creativity?’ But it is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create?”
– Abraham Maslow

34
“Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.”
– William Plomer

35
“Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”
– William James

36
“Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.”
– Anna Freud

37
“Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.”
– T.S. Eliot

38
“Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity”
– Michael Porter

39
“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
– Bertrand Russell

40
“All human progress is about abnormality. Innovation necessarily, by definition, violates pre-existing norms.”
– Unknown

41
“It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning”
– Salvador Dali

42
“The world is but a canvas to the imagination.”
– Henry David Thoreau

43
“Creativity is the quality that you bring to the activity that you are doing. It is an attitude, an inner approach – how you look at things . . . Whatsoever you do, if you do it joyfully, if you do it lovingly, if your act of doing is not purely economical, then it is creative.”
– Osho

44
“To unpathed waters, undreamed shores.”
– William Shakespeare

45
“Creativity – like human life itself – begins in darkness.”
– Julia Cameron

46
“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.”
– Mary L. Cook

47
“Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.”
– Mason Cooley

48
“Today’s economy is fundamentally a creative economy.”
– Richard Florida

49
“My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”
– Sir Ken Robinson

50
“Great art picks up where nature ends.”
– Marc Chagall

51
“The mark of the creative mind is that it defies a part of what it has learned.”
– Ludwig von Mises

52
“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known. ”
– Chuck Palahniuk