Creativity Quotes

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.
George Lois

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
Linus Pauling

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

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


No great thing is created suddenly.
Epictetus

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

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
George Bernard Shaw

I will master something, then the creativity will come.
Japanese Proverb

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

Eveyone is a genius at least once a year. A real genius has his original ideas closer together.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
Rollo May


One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
A. A. Milne


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 or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.
Abraham Maslow

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
Steve Jobs

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

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
Oscar Wilde

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

Creative minds are rarely tidy.

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.
Buckminster Fuller

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.
Ray Bradbury


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

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
Edward de Bono

The world is but a canvas to the imagination.
Henry David Thoreau

Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way to create.
Lillian Hellman


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

There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.
Marie Antoinette

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams


Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
Franklin D. Roosevelt


All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso

Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness.
Julia Cameron


A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely . . . but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude . . .
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is "trying things to see if they work."
Ray Bradbury

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
Buckminster Fuller


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


The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
Saul Steinberg

It is better to create than to be learned, creating is the true essence of life.
Barthold Georg Niebuhr


You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.
Nietzsche

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
Oscar Levant


An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
Virginia Woolf


The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Albert Einstein

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
Beatrix Potter

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