Creative quotes
3.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside creative — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Before embarking on important undertakings sit quietly calm your senses and thoughts and meditate deeply. You will then be guided by the great creative power of Spirit."
"As a rule I don't like suffering to no purpose. Suffering should be creative, should give birth to something good and lovely."
"When you spend your life in a creative mode all the time mindless leaf blowing can be a welcome break."
"The naked women's body is a portion of eternity too great for the eye of man."
"Creative exploration [is] impossible, without (humble) acknowledgement of the unknown."
"The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest."
"Creative success means balancing your love of starting things with a habit of finishing them."
"That's what's so amazing about climbing - it's not just a sport. It's a lifestyle, it's a way of being creative, of connecting with yourself and with nature."
"...As an artist, you need the naysayers and the nonbelievers to add fuel to your creative fire."
"To be a hacker - when I use the term - is somebody who is creative and does wonderful things."
"Instead of asking "what’s the problem?" ask "what's the creative opportunity?"
"Everyone is an artist. Everyone is creative in their own way and that that creativity is a great thing. It's a human thing and it needs to be nurtured and it can help us go down life's path and help us to become deeper, richer, more satisfied human beings."
"I am sure the next step will be the electronic image, and I hope I shall live to see it. I trust that the creative eye will continue to function, whatever technological innovations may develop."
"When you accurately perceive the fluidity of things, you can also begin to perceive the constancy behind them: the creative, transformative, boundless, immutable Tao."
"You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over."
"What are the conditions of the creative attitude, of seeing and responding, of being aware and being sensitive to what one is aware of? First of all it requires the capacity to be puzzled. Children still have the capacity to be puzzled."
"Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable. This is what makes it so disturbing to look back upon the time which we have lost. Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering. Time lost is time not filled, time left empty."
"Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with."
"Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity."
"I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing."
