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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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