Creativity
- The ability to relate and to connect, sometimes in odd and yet striking fashion, lies at the very heart of any creative use of the mind, no mattter in what field or discipline.--George J. Seidel
- Any form of art is a form of power, it has impact, it can affect change--it can not only move us, it makes us move.--Ossie Davis
- [The artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation--and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear…which binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.--Joseph Conrad
- Be brave enough to live creatively. 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. You can't get there by bus, only by hard work, risking, and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover will be wonderful: yourself.--Alan Alda
- The capacity to be puzzled is … the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.--Eric Fromm ("The Creative Attitude" in Creativity and It Cultivation ed. by Anderson)
- Change isn't optional, and creation isn't something that happened a long time ago and then ended. It's ongoing, and we are invited to be a part of it. The question for us is 'what will we create in this new day?' How will we make it count? How will we nourish the things that matter, and stand in the way of injustice in the small ways that add up to the arc of history? You are invited to participate in the creation of this day...--David LaMotte (in the 12 Days of Christmas Devotions by the God Article, Day 6, Dec. 30, 2012)
- The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.--Pablo Picasso
- Conditions for creativity are:
to be puzzled;
to concentrate;
to accept conflict and tension;
to be born everyday;
to feel a sense of self.--Erich Fromm
- Cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music. And cooking draws upon your every talent--science, mathematics, energy, history, experience--and the more experience you have, the less likely are your experiments to end in drivel and disaster. The more you know, the more you can create.--Julia Child
- The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.--Carl Jung
- The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.--John W. Gardner
- Creative minds are rarely tidy.--John William Gardner (Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society)
- Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.--R. D. Laing
- 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
- The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things -- ancient history, 19th century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later, or six months, or six years. But he has faith that it will happen. --Carl Ally
- 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.--Thomas Troward
- The creative process takes its own course. If it did otherwise, it would not be creative.--F. W. Martin (Experiment in Depth)
- Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once.--Mary Oliver ("Of Power and Time" in Upstream: Selected Essays)
- Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality overcomes everything.--George Lois
- Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.--Rita Mae Brown (Starting From Scratch)
- Creativity comes with being human; it is the power to think new, to imagine, to see a metaphor. Animals make by instinct. People get new ideas. All you need is an open mind.--Jean Unsworth
- Creativity defeats complication with simplicity, overcomes fear with empowerment, and discovers order by achieving balance.--Michael Rawls
- Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands.--Brene Brown (Rising Strong: the Reckoning, the Rumble, the Revolution)
- Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.--Edward de Bono
- Creativity is a great motivator because it makes people interested in what they are doing. Creativity gives hope that there can be a worthwhile idea. Creativity gives the possibility of some sort of achievement to everyone. Creativity makes life more fun and more interesting.--Edward de Bono (Serious Creativity)
- Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.--Scott Adams
- 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.--Lou Dorfsman
- Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.--Mary Lou Cook
- Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird--that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace--making the complicated simple, awesomely simple--that's creativity.--Charles Mingus (To Reveal the Creator)
- Creativity is rich with unexpected possibility. Know-how is mere fragmented mechanics which lacks tradition. --John O'Donohue (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)
- Creativity is the unbounded refuge of the imaginative.--Michael Rawls
- Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.-–Leo Burnett
- Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live.--Mae Jemison
- 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
- Early in my career I felt that organization would destroy my creativity. Whereas now, I feel the opposite. Discipline is he concrete that allows you to be creative.--Verna Gibson
- Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.--C. S. Lewis
- Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.--Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Focus should be to encourage and develop creativity in all children without the ultimate goal begin to make all children inventors, but rather to develop a future generation of critical thinkers.--Faraq Mousa
- Genius...means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.--William James
- I believe that none of us ever fails at anything. Every time we create something we are successful at creation. However, we do make some poor choices about what we create.--Anonymous
- I learned...that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.--Brenda Ueland
- I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.--Madelein L'Engle (A Circle of Quiet)
- I think there are two keys to being creatively productive. One is not being daunted by one's fear of failure. the second is sheer perseverance.--Mary-Claire King
- If all your peers understand what you've done, it's not creative.--H. Heimlich
- If you are going to be original, you are going to be wrong a lot.--Anonymous
- 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
- Imagination is the spark that ignites the fire of creativity.--Richard Laurence Peterson
- In producers, loafing is productive; and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.--Jacques Barzun
- Inventiveness leaps beyond competence, and utilizes a sense of freedom to venture beyond the known. It is a personal resource developed from multiple experiences, a muscle strengthened with practice and frequent use.--Michael Rawls (from Friday's Inspiration: Remember These Things - 3-12-2004)
- It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.--Herman Melville
- It is important to do what you don't know how to do. It is important to see your skills as keeping you from learning what is deepest and most mysterious. If you know how to focus, unfocus. If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos.--Carlos Casteneda
- It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys.--Antoine De Saint-Exupery
- It's as if we think liberation a fixed quantity, that there is only so much to go around. That an individual or community is liberated at the expense of another: When we view liberation as a scarce resource, something only a precious few of us can have, we stifle our potential, our creativity, our genius for living, learning and growing.--Andrea Canaan
- It's hard for corporations to understand that creativity is not just about succeeding. It's about experimenting and discovering.--Gordon Mackenzie (Orbiting the Giant Hairball : A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace)
- I’ve come to believe that creativity is the mechanism that allows learning to seep into our being and become practice.--Brene Brown (Rising Strong: the Reckoning, the Rumble, the Revolution)
- Life is creation. Self and circumstances are the raw material.--Dorothy M. Richardson
- The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom.. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.--Saul Steinberg
- Limitations are the soil from which creativity grow.--Stewart Butterfield
- Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.--Charles Mingus
- Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things cannot be changed.--Tom Clancy (Debt of Honor)
- Many people are inventive, sometimes cleverly so. But real creativity begins with the drive to work on and on and on.--Margueritte Harmon Bro (Sarah)
- Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.--Albert Camus
- Most of what you will create is for your enrichment or is a stepping stone to other better, more insightful work. Maybe once or twice in a lifetime you will be recognized with the kudos of the public, so in the meantime, create for yourself.--Don Hahn (Dancing Corn Dogs in the Night: Reawakening Your creative Spirit)
- Neither intelligence nor judgment are creative. If a sculptor is nothing but science and intelligence, his hands will have no talent.--Antoine de St. Exupery (Flight to Arras)
- No greater thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.--Epictetus
- No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.--Ansel Adams
- One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.--A. A. Milne
- The only truly happy people are children and the creative minority.--Jean Caldwell
- Only when men are connected to large, universal goals are they really happy - and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity.--Joyce Carol Oates
- Out of suffering comes creativity. You cannot spell painting without pain.--John Lithgow
- 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 principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.--Arthur Koestler
- The process of writing, any form of creativity, is a power intensifying life.--Rita Mae Brown (Starting From Scratch)
- Proximity to the crowd, to the majority view, spells the death of creativity. For a soul can create only when alone, and some are chosen for the flowering that takes place in the dark avenues of night.--Abraham Joshua Heschel
- [Smart] is an elusive concept. There's a certain sharpness, an ability to absorb new facts. To ask an insightful question. To relate to domains that may not seem connected at first. A certain creativity that allows people to be effective.--William H. Gates (Interview with "Playboy")
- Sometimes you gotta create what you want to be a part of.--Geri Weitzman
- Successful people engage that creative part of their minds and ask, "Well, I wonder how else I can look at this problem? I wonder how else I could deal with this decision? I wonder what other possibilities I have there?"--Jim Rohn ( Jim Rohn's Weekly E-zine - January 14, 2003)
- Then let me go to nature as I came from nature to the great cycles of creativity that I have dimly, so dimly, understood...--Mary Jean Irion ("Then Let Me Go to Nature")
- There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish.--Warren Bennis
- There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.--Edward de Bono
- True creativity is characterized by a succession of acts each dependent on the one before and suggesting the one after.--Edwin H. Land
- Uncertainty and mystery are energies of life. Don't let them scare you unduly, for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity.--R. I. Fitzhenry
- The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.--Antony Jay
- We are born makers. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands.--Brene Brown (Rising Strong: the Reckoning, the Rumble, the Revolution)
- We are the music makers.
We are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;--
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.--Arthur O'Shaughnessy (Ode)
- We know where most of the creativeity, the innovation, the stuff that drives productivity lies--in the minds of those closest to the work. It's been there in front of our noses all along while we've been running around chasing robots and reading books on how to become Japanese--or at least manage like them.--John F. Welch, chairman, GE
- We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.--Edward de Bono (Serious Creativity)
- What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.--Isaac Bashevis Singer
- 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
- When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales. I scratch my head with the lightning and purr myself to sleep with the thunder.--Mark Twain
- When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on Earth. So what the hell, leap!--Peter McWilliams
- When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.--Madeleine L'Engle (Walking on Water)
- Whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.--Julia Cameron
- The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.--Charles Dickens
- Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.--Bette Davis (The Lonely Life)
- Yes, of course [this age] is materialistic, but the only way to counteract it is to create spiritual things. Don't worry yourself about the materialism too much. Create and stir other people to create!--Robert Frost
- You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.--Maya Angelou
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