Being creative is easier said, than done. Our collection of creativity quotes will give you various authors, artists, and entrepreneurs’ take on being creative. The sayings provide perspective on: what is creativity, how to harness it, and directions on approach. If you’re looking for the spark to set off your innovative flame, you just might find it here. Enjoy.
Top Creativity Quotes
Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.
Dorothy Parker – Review her work
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be sparked.
Plutarch, Roman Philsopher
Around here, however, we don’t look backwards 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
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
The creative adult is the child who survived.
Unknown
The unfed mind devours itself.
Gore Vidal
Talent works, genius creates.
Unknown
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
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
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
The wastebasket is a writer’s best friend.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Resist much. Obey little.
Walt Whitman – The Walt Whitman Archive
Be Creative Quotes
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
John Updike
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
John Steinbeck
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
Dance first, think later.
Samuel Beckett
Where observation is concerned, chance favors the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur
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
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
Pablo Picasso Creativity Quotes
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.
Pablo Picasso
Every child is an artist, the problem is staying a child when you grow up.
Pablo Picasso
To draw, you must close your eyes and sing.
Pablo Picasso
Quotes about Creativity
I’d rather know some of the questions, than all of the answers.
James Thurber
Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.
Leo Burnett, Advertising Agency Owner
What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a 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 onewhich is really the realm of the artist.
Federico Fellini
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
Joseph Chilton Pierce
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
Maya Angelou
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
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
A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.
John F. Kennedy
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Bertrand Russell
Everything of importance has been seen by someone who did not discover it.
Alfred North Whitehead
Creative Quotes
The best spice is hunger.
Unknown
Name the greatest of all inventors: accident.
Mark Twain
Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
Goethe
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
John Cage
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
So you see, imagination needs moodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland
It is only through failure and through experiment that we learn and grow.
Isaac Stern, Violinist
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice.
Erich Fromm
Einstein creativity quote
Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.
Albert Einstein
Creativity is intelligence having fun.
Albert Einstein
Steve Jobs creativity quotes
- 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.
- Life is about creating and living experiences that are worth sharing.
- Older people sit down and ask, “What is it,” but the boy asks, “What can I do with it?”
- Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.
Three More from Steve Jobs
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 Creativity
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
When you’re green, you’re growing. When you’re ripe, you rot.
Unknown
Go where the silence is and say something.
Amy Goodman
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
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
John Maynard Keynes
40 Ways to Boost Your Creativity Video
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
Life is trying things to see if they work.
Ray Bradbury
The stone age didn’t end because they ran out of stones.
Unknown
Famous Creativity Quotes
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
Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.
George Lois
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
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
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
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
I have great faith in fools — my friends call it self-confidence.
Edgar Allan Poe
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
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