Creativity quotes
3.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside creativity — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify."
"There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness."
"Order and creativity are complementary."
"All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she has extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind-states may well attend her creativity."
"Detach the writer from the milieu where he has experienced his greatest sense of belonging, and you have created a discontinuity within his personality, a short circuit in his identity. The result is his originality, his creativity comes to an end. He becomes the one-book novelist or the one-trilogy writer."
"I desire that your conjectures should not reach beyond your creative will. Could you create a god? Then do not speak to me of any gods."
"What tender and devoted mother wouldn't be dismayed and ill with terror at her son's or daughter's stepping even one hair's breath off the beaten track. No, better let him be happy and live in comfort without originality, is what every mother thinks when she rocks the cradle. The only person among us who can fail to reach the general's rank is the original man - in other words, the man who won't be quiet."
"Creativity is no less challenging or exciting when the mystery is stripped from the creative process. The most beautiful flowers grow under careful cultivation from common soil."
"We are asking a really fundamental question whether thought can ever be creative. If thought is not the ground of creation then what is creation? Is love the only factor that is creative?"
"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?""
"The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency."
"Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were"
"Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art."
"All creative art is magic , is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind , pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality ."
"Creativity is an unending exercise in uncertainty."
"Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity."
"Creativity or talent, like electricity, is something I don't understand but something I'm able to harness and use."
"I want to create endless possibilities with this cello. I become the medium through which the music is being channeled."
"A lack of seriousness has led to all sorts of wonderful insights."
"Not so long ago people believed in ideologies, systems, and institutions to save all societies. Today, they have given up such hopes and have returned to relying on the individual, on individual freedom, individual initiative, individual creativity."
