Motivational Quotes

Creativity

It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.

- Williams, Tennessee

Best Quotes about Creativity

To create something you must be something.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.

Bono, Edward De

There were always people like the pope. They serve a certain function, of course. They subsidize us. But, they don't create anything and they must never be allowed to stop the artist from creating.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

Frugality without creativity is deprivation.

Amy Dacyczyn

The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.

Picasso, Pablo

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives its final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.

Duchamp, Marcel

True creativity often starts where language ends.

Koestler, Arthur

The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the creative is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.

Sarton, May

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.

Fromm, Erich

10.

Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. The creative explorer looks for history in a hardware store and fashion in an airport.

Wieder, Robert

11.

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

Artaud, Antonin

12.

Creation is a drug I can't do without.

Mille, Cecil B. De

13.

Thoughts give birth to a creative force that is neither elemental nor sidereal. Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow. When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven.

Paracelsus, Philipus A.

14.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.

Proust, Marcel

16.

The essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail.

Land, Edwin H.

17.

All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself -- civilization, in a word is the fruits of the creative artist. It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape.

Miller, Henry

18.

I do not seek, I find.

Picasso, Pablo

19.

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Koestler, Arthur

20.

When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation.

Sackville, Margaret

21.

Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.

Dorfsman, Lou

22.

Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an after-life.

Stassinopoulos, Arianna

23.

The whole difference between construction and creation is this; that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Dickens, Charles

24.

Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.

Bennett, Arnold

25.

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

Land, Edwin H.

26.

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

Aldiss, Brian

27.

The person who can combine frames of reference and draw connections between ostensibly unrelated points of view is likely to be the one who makes the creative breakthrough.

Shekerjian, Denise

28.

Every time we say, "Let there be!" in any form, something happens.

Stella Terrill Mann

29.

Out of nothing can come, and nothing can become nothing.

Persius

30.

When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied:'Only stand out of my light.'Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light.

John W. Gardner

31.

Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.

Klee, Paul

32.

Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.

Cecil B. DeMille

33.

A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstinting has been naught.

Yeats, William Butler

34.

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.

Dee Hock

35.

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

George Lois

36.

The lash may force men to physical labor, it cannot force them to spiritual creativity.

Asch, Sholem

37.

The creative process involves getting input, making a recommendation, getting critical review, getting more input, improving the recommendation, getting more critical review... again and again and again.

38.

Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?

Horney, Karen

39.

Observe Everything. Communicate Well. Draw, Draw, Draw.

Frank Thomas

40.

Williams, Tennessee

41.

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.

Auden, W. H.

42.

I have asked a lot of my emotions --one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something, not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.

43.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Fromm, Erich

44.

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.

Rosenberg, Harold

45.

Had I been present at the creation of the world I would have proposed some improvements.

Alfonso X

46.

Creativity comes from awakening and directing men's higher natures, which originate in the primal depths of the uni- verse and are appointed by Heaven.

I Ching

47.

It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm.

Henle, Mary

48.

The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything --and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the productive man a yet higher species.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

49.

Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.

Twain, Mark

50.

One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.

Sandburg, Carl