85 quotes about Creativity
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The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.
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Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.
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Had I been present at the creation of the world I would have proposed some improvements.
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The creative person wants to be a know -it -all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth -century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and 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 down the road. But he has faith that it will happen.
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No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
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The lash may force men to physical labor, it cannot force them to spiritual creativity.
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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.
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Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.
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I must create a system or be enslaved by another man s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.
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Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.
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Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.
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The good ideas are all hammered out in agony by individuals, not spewed out by groups.
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The human mind cannot create anything. It produces nothing until after having been fertilized by experience and meditation; its acquisitions are the gems of its production.
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It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.
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A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.
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Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.
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First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
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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.
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It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
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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.
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There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.
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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.
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The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
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The legs are the wheels of creativity.
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That which builds is better than that which is built.
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Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.
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Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
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Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
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We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
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We try not to have ideas, preferring accidents. To create, you must empty yourself of every artistic thought.
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Because of their courage, their lack of fear, they (creative people) are willing to make silly mistakes. The truly creative person is one who can think crazy; such a person knows full well that many of his great ideas will prove to be worthless. The creative person is flexible -- he is able to change as the situation changes, to break habits, to face indecision and changes in conditions without undue stress. He is not threatened by the unexpected as rigid, inflexible people are.
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A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.
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To create something you must be something.
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From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?
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It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm.
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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?
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Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity.
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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.
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Genius is initiative on fire.
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A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations.
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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.
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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.
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Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty -- as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.
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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.
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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.
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Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
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True creativity often starts where language ends.
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Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.
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Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.
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The essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail.
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Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.
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Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.
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It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.
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The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
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Creation is a drug I can't do without.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Out of nothing can come, and nothing can become nothing.
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The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.
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I do not seek, I find.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation.
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One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
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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.
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It is wise to learn; it is God-like to create.
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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.
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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.
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I do my best work when I am in pain and turmoil.
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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.
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Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
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