Home » Blog » Quotes and Captions » 55 Creativity Quotes for the Playful Mind

55 Creativity Quotes for the Playful Mind

Being creative is easier said than done. Our collection of creativity quotes for the playful mind will give you various authors’, artists’, and entrepreneurs’ takes on being creative.

The sayings provide perspective on creativity, how to harness it, and directions on approach.

You might find a spark to set off your innovative flame. Enjoy.

Creativity Takes Courage.

Best Creativity Quotes

1.) Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.
Dorothy Parker – Review Dorothy Parker’s work

2.) The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be sparked.
Plutarch, Roman Philosopher

3.) Around here, however, we don’t look backward for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things because we’re curious — and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.
Walt Disney — See 100 Walt Disney Quotations and Sayings.

4.) 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

5.) The creative adult is the child who survived.
Unknown

6.) The unfed mind devours itself.
Gore Vidal

7.) Talent works and genius creates.
Unknown

8.) 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

9.) The highest prize we can receive for creative work is the joy of being creative. Creative effort spent for any other reason than the joy of being in that light-filled space, love, god, whatever we want to call it, is lacking in integrity.
Marianne Williamson

10.) A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

11.) The wastebasket is a writer’s best friend.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

12.) Resist much. Obey little.
Walt Whitman – The Walt Whitman Archive

Creativity quotes for the playful mind.

Be Creative Quotations

13.) Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
John Updike

14.) Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon, you have a dozen.
John Steinbeck

15.) If you hear a voice within you say, ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means, paint, and that voice will be silenced.
Vincent van Gogh

16.) Dance first, think later.
Samuel Beckett

17.) Where observation is concerned, chance favors the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur

18.) 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

19.) 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

Check out Anime Quotes

Pablo Picasso Quotes

20.) God is really another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style – He just goes on trying other things.

21.) Every child is an artist; the problem is staying a child when you grow up.

22.) To draw, you must close your eyes and sing.

See Best Imagination Quotes.

Quotes about Creativity

23.) I’d rather know some of the questions, than all of the answers.
James Thurber

24.) Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.
Leo Burnett, Advertising Agency Owner

25.) What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between physical reality and a metaphysical one…. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one which is really the realm of the artist.
Federico Fellini

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

27.) You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
Maya Angelou – See more famous quotations from Maya Angelou

28.) By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The non-existent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
Nikos Kazantzakis

29.) One of my early mentors, poet David Wagoner, who divides the creative process into three phases – madman, poet, and critic – once told me that you need to find your own magic to stay in the world of creative play.
Sonia Gernes

30.) A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.
John F. Kennedy

31.) Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Bertrand Russell

32.) Everything of importance has been seen by someone who did not discover it.
Alfred North Whitehead

See 37 Magical Michael Buble quotations.

Good Creative Quotes

33.) The best spice is hunger.
Unknown

34.) Name the greatest of all inventors: accident.
Mark Twain

35.) Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
Goethe

36.) I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
John Cage

37.) We have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent categories, and have, for the first time in history, created an industry without art.
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

38.) So you see, imagination needs moodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling, and puttering.
Brenda Ueland

39.) It is only through failure and through experiment that we learn and grow.
Isaac Stern, Violinist

40.) Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
George Bernard Shaw

41.) I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice.
Erich Fromm

See Good Art Sayings.

Einstein Creativity Quotes

42.) Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.

43.) Creativity is intelligence having fun.

Steve Jobs Creativity Quotes

44.) It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

45.) Life is about creating and living experiences that are worth sharing.

46.) Older people sit down and ask, “What is it,” but the boy asks, “What can I do with it?”

47.) Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

48.) 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.

49.) Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.

50.) We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.

Steve Jobs on Innovation

51.) Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked.

52.) In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

53.) Picasso had a saying. He said, ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists, and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

Quotes on Inventiveness

54.) Look sharply after your thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen in your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

55.) When you’re green, you’re growing. When you’re ripe, you rot.
Unknown

56.) Go where the silence is and say something.
Amy Goodman

57.) To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty; you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.
Osho

58.) The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
John Maynard Keynes

59.) Held in the palms of thousands of disgruntled people over the centuries have been ideas worth millions – if they only had taken the first step and then followed through.
Robert M. Hayes

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

61.) The stone age didn’t end because they ran out of stones.
Unknown

62.) 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

Famous Creativity Quotes

64.) An artist paints, dances, draws, writes, designs, or acts at the expanding edge of consciousness. We press into the unknown rather than the known. This makes life lovely and lively.
Julia Cameron

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

67.) When you are describing,
A shape, or sound, or tint;
Don’t state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things,
With a sort of mental squint.
Lewis Carroll

68.) 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. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.
Alan Alda

69.) The best way to learn to cook is to cook: stand yourself in front of the stove and start right in.
Julie Dannenbaum, American Chef

70.) 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

71.) I have great faith in fools — my friends call it self-confidence.
Edgar Allan Poe

72.) 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

Short Creativity Quotes

73.) Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while working.
Henri Matisse

74.) Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought.
Albert Einstein

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

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

77.) The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense.
Pablo Picasso

78.) Creativity takes courage.
Henri Matisse

79.) Have no fear of perfection; you’ll never reach it.
Salvador Dali

80.) The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.
Bruce Lee

81.) What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul.
Deepak Chopra

82.) Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.
Vincent Van Gogh

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

Creativity Quotes To Inspire

84.) Creativity involves breaking out of expected patterns in order to look at things in a different way.
Edward de Bono

85.) Creativity doesn’t wait for that perfect moment. It fashions its own perfect moments out of ordinary ones.
Bruce Garrabrandt

86.) True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse.’
Arthur Rimbaud

87.) It’s no good being too easily swayed by people’s opinions. You have to believe in yourself.
Donatella Versace

88.) The power of our dreams and the creativity we employ can break the chains of injustice and oppression.
Desmond Tutu

89.) The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.
James Baldwin

90.) The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf

91.) A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a lot more interesting life.
Elizabeth Gilbert

92.) Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas.
Donatella Versace

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

94.) Creativity is intelligence having fun.
Albert Einstein

95.) Replace fear with curiosity.
Steven Spielberg

Funny Creativity Quotes

96.) Have no fear of perfection; you’ll never reach it.
Salvador Dali

97.) The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.
Pablo Picasso

98.) I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.
Duke Ellington

99.) Maybe swearing will help.
Unknown

100.) Art is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s probably not that good.
Unknown

By Michael O’Halloran

About Michael O'Halloran

Michael O’Halloran founded Greeting Card Poet in 2014 and has worked as its publisher and editor ever since. He’s the author of Best Sports Slogans and Captions. He has co-authored four books on kids’ trivia and authored four books on coaching. Previously, Michael was the president of Magnetic Poetry. He has invented and brought over 75 new gift and toy products to market — most of them dealing with wordplay.

Extra Extra

You’re on the Creativity Quotes page.

You might like:

Art Sayings

73 Beautiful Nature Quotes

Shel Silverstein Quotations

Cool Quotes