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Feeling a little blocked? These creativity quotes will inspire you to get creative and innovative in no time.
Human creativity is what drives us forward as a species.
This unique ability to harness our thoughts and ideas has generated some of the world’s greatest inventions, from the wheel to the microprocessor.
To that end, here are the best creativity quotes to stimulate imagination and innovation through the creative process.
Top 10 Creativity Quotes
Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.
Albert Einstein
Creativity makes a leap, then looks to see where it is.
Mason Cooley
Thinking is the enemy of creativity.
Ray Bradbury
Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas.
Donatella Versace
Creativity takes courage.
Henri Matisse
To be creative means to be in love with life.
Osho
Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.
Eric Hoffer
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
Maya Angelou
Quotes about Creativity
Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.
Edward de Bono
Necessity is the mother of invention, it is true, but its father is creativity, and knowledge is the midwife.
Jonathan Schattke
There’s no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.
Ray Bradbury
Controversy is part of the nature of art and creativity.
Yoko Ono
The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Sylvia Plath
Creativity doesn’t need to be a Herculean event. But it does need consistent fostering.
Carla Johnson
Energy is the key to creativity. Energy is the key to life.
William Shatner
It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation.
Herman Melville
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
Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Arthur Koestler
Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. It is a process; it’s not random.
Ken Robinson
The more you know, the more you want to know. Not only that, but the more you know, the more connections you can make between the different bits of knowledge that you have in your head and therefore the more ideas you have, which is why curiosity is really the wellspring of creativity.
Georgina Venning
Absurdity and anti-absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.
Karl Lagerfeld
Creativity is just connecting things.
Steve Jobs
To live is to express, and to express you have to create. Creation is never merely repetition. To live is to express oneself freely in creation.
Bruce Lee
Art, freedom, and creativity will change society faster than politics.
Victor Pinchuk
Creativity doesn’t wait for that perfect moment. It fashions its own perfect moments out of ordinary ones.
Bruce Garrabrandt
Creativity is always a leap of faith. You’re faced with a blank page, blank easel, or an empty stage.
Julia Cameron
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
Virginia Wolfe
Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer.
Marilyn Monroe
There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Creativity is seeing something that doesn’t exist already. You need to find out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God.
Michele Shea
The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.
Joan Miró
Written reports stifle creativity.
H. Ross Perot
Creativity is the greatest expression of liberty.
Bryant H. McGill
Creativity is based on the belief that there’s no particular virtue in doing things they way they’ve always been done.
Rudolph Flesch
Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.
Gail Sheehy
Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.
Mary Lou Cook
Anxiety is part of creativity, the need to get something out.
David Duchovny
When I am completely myself, entirely alone during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Creative thinking – in terms of idea creativity – is not a mystical talent. It is a skill that can be practiced and nurtured.
Edward de Bono
Without freedom, there is no creation.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.
Pablo Picasso
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
John Maynard Keynes
Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.
George Lois
The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.
Neil Gaiman
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
Creativity is the quality that you bring to the activity that you are doing. It is an attitude, an inner approach – how you look at things . . . Whatsoever you do, if you do it joyfully, if you do it lovingly, if your act of doing is not purely economical, then it is creative.
Osho
Creative People
Truly creative people care a little about what they have done, and a lot about what they are doing.
Alan Cohen
Creative people are often found either disagreeable or intimidating by mediocrities.
Criss Jami
Some people use things; they destroy. You’re a creator, a builder.
Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.
Leo Burnett
Truly creative people care a little about what they have done, and a lot about what they are doing. Their driving focus is the life force that surges in them now.
Alan Cohen
Creativity is the soul of the true scholar.
Nnamdi Azikiwe
Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.
Rita Mae Brown
When you can do a common thing in an uncommon way; you will command the attention of the world.
George Washington Carver
Creativity is people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it.
Tim Cook
People have a God-given right to use their creativity to produce things that improve our lives.
Paul Ryan
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, 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
If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
John Cleese
When we engage in what we are naturally suited to do, our work takes on the quality of play and it is play that stimulates creativity.
Linda Naiman
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
Everybody has a creative potential and from the moment you can express this creative potential, you can start changing the world.
Paulo Coelho
A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations.
Gerald G. Jampolsky
Every day is an opportunity to be creative – the canvas is your mind, the brushes and colors are your thoughts and feelings, the panorama is your story, the complete picture is a work of art called, ‘my life’. Be careful what you put on the canvas of your mind today – it matters.
Innerspace
Creativity is seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought.
Albert Einstein
When anybody pays you to be creative, you’re very lucky.
Donald Glover
A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
Ayn Rand
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.
Frank Goble
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
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 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
Innovation and Creative Ideas
A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.
John F. Kennedy
An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.
Edward de Bono
If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.
Peter F. Drucker
All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions.
Leonardo Da Vinci
When the uncreative tell the creative what to do, it stops being art.
Tony Bennett
Creative works may indeed be kind of like property, but it’s property that we’re all building on.
Kirby Ferguson
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
The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.
Anthony Jay
Rational thoughts never drive people’s creativity the way emotions do.
Neil Degrasse Tyson
It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
Edward de Bono
An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.
Edward de Bono
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
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
An idea is like a virus. Resilient.
Leonardo DiCaprio, Inception
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Arthur Koestler
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
Oscar Wilde
Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.
Dee Hock
Invention strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come from nothing.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.
Voltaire
Create with the heart; build with the mind.
Criss Jami
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.
Charles Brower
The question is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the end, creativity isn’t just the things we choose to put in, it’s the things we choose to leave out.
Austin Kleon
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
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
Carl Jung
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
Oscar Wilde
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
Reason is a harmonizing, controlling force rather than a creative one.
Bertrand Russell
Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try.
Dr. Seuss
The important thing for you is to be alert, to question, to find out, so that your own initiative may be awakened.
Bruce Lee
Creative thinking is not a mystical talent. It is a skill that can be practiced and nurtured.
Edward de Bono
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Carl Sagan
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams
Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.
Theodore Levitt
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
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.
Mary Shelly
Outrageous behavior, also known as the lunatic fringe, is the seed bed of innovation and creativity.
Joel Salatin
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
Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.
Brené Brown
Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.
Albert Einstein
Creative Genius Quotes
Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
William James
You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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
Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
Benjamin Franklin
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Bertrand Russell
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most talented, thought-provoking, game-changing people are never normal.
Sir Richard Branson
Your soul is infinitely creative. It is alive and expansive in nature. It is curious and playful, changing with the tides of time.
Debbie Ford
The inner fire is the most important thing mankind possesses.
Edith Södergran
A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.
Charles Caleb Colton
The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
Arthur Koestler
For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.
Jean Dubuffet
I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.
Arthur Erickson
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
There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.
Marta Graham
Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.
Elizabeth Gilbert
An artist or a creative person of any kind goes about their work because it’s their path, it’s what excites them, it’s what aligns their soul with who they truly are, who they showed up to be.
Wayne W. Dyer
By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it.
Nikos Kazantzakis
The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.
Julia Cameron
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
It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.
Salvador Dali
Fun Creativity Quotes
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Albert Einstein
You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.
Jack London
It’s no accident that AHA and HAHA are spelled almost the same way.
Mitch Ditkoff
A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
Abraham Maslow
The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.
Ernest Becker
Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
Beatrix Potter
Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing.
Austin Cleon
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such.
Steve Wozniak
The Stone Age didn’t end because they ran out of stones.
Unknown
The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.
G.K. Chesterton,
The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery
We hope these creativity quotes lit a spark in your mind and helped you feel more creative.
Despite our incredible capacity for creativity and imagination, many of us actually understand very little about the creative process.
Where do we get our great ideas, and how do we transform a figment of our imagination into an innovative product that might change the world?
While we may not fully understand the nature of creativity and the creative process, research shows that being more creative and fueling your imagination can make you healthier and happier. So don’t be shy about starting your next creative project soon!