Quotes about creativity

"Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place."

Jung, Carl on creativity   

"The power in which we must have faith if we would be well, is the creative and curative power which exists in every living thing."

Kellogg, John on creativity   

"Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty -- as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it."

King, Florence on creativity   

"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 on creativity   

"Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted."

Kneller, George on creativity   

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

Koestler, Arthur on creativity
4 fans of this quote   

"True creativity often starts where language ends."

Koestler, Arthur on creativity
4 fans of this quote   

"Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday."

Kroc, Ray on creativity   

"Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity."

Land, Edwin H. on creativity   

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

Land, Edwin H. on creativity
11 fans of this quote   

"Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system."

Lee, Bruce on creativity   

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

Lois, George on creativity
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"It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection."

Maugham, W. Somerset on creativity   

"The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate."

Mille, Agnes De on creativity   

"Creation is a drug I can't do without."

Mille, Cecil B. De on creativity   

"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 on creativity   

"There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry."

Miller, Henry on creativity   

"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 on creativity   

"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. on creativity   

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

Persius on creativity   

"The chief enemy of creativity is good taste."

Picasso, Pablo on creativity
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"I do not seek, I find."

Picasso, Pablo on creativity   

"Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy-the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence."

Podhoretz, Norman on creativity   

"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 on creativity
4 fans of this quote   

"An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human."

Ray, Man on creativity   

"Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of."

Rilke, Rainer Maria on creativity   

"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 on creativity   

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

Sackville, Margaret on creativity   

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

Sandburg, Carl on creativity
5 fans of this quote   

"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 on creativity   

"It is wise to learn; it is God-like to create."

Saxe, John on creativity   

"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 on creativity   

"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 on creativity   

"I do my best work when I am in pain and turmoil."

Sting on creativity   

"Creative power, is that receptive attitude of expectancy which makes a mold into which the plastic and as yet undifferentiated substance can flow and take the desired form."

Troward, Thomas on creativity   

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

Twain, Mark on creativity
3 fans of this quote   

"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."

Unknown, Source on creativity   

"One measure of how creative you are is how you respond to changes in your circumstances and environment. How flexible are you? Consider how water adapts to its environment: evaporation, condensation, snowflake, melting, flowing, goes around rocks, fills containers, etc."

Unknown, Source on creativity   

"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."

Unknown, Source on creativity   

"Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious."

Valery, Paul on creativity
4 fans of this quote