Creative quotes
3.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside creative — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Only the mind that has emptied itself of the known is creative. That is creation. What it creates has nothing to do with it. Freedom from the known is the state of a mind that is in creation."
"All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising."
"That which is creative must create itself."
"The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority."
"It's very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there's no creative crop to harvest."
"My life wasn't beautiful and creative before I became politically active. My life was totally changed when I began to struggle."
"Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort - these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work."
"I've always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It's people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories."
"Be creative. Men only learnt how to fly when they stopped imitating birds."
"Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity."
"Agape is something of the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it's what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them."
"Today we are going to talk about words. You know, words are containers for power. They carry creative or destructive power. They carry positive or negative power. We can choose our words and we should do it carefully."
"Everybody has a creative potential and from the moment you can express this creative potential, you can start changing the world."
"If you never venture outside the box, you will probably not be creative. But if you never get inside the box, you will certainly be stupid."
"The truth about not having everything you need, not being fully equipped or qualified or allowed is that these limits are the nebula of creative genius. When you have total freedom i.e: no limits at all. You stop trying to make the best of things"
"Most people aren't anywhere near to realizing their creative potential, in part because they're laboring in environments that impede intrinsic motivation."
"Creativity is a continual surprise."
"I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns - you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshipers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns."
"The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each."
"The ultimate creative thinking technique is to think like God. If you're an atheist, pretend how God would do it."
