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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"I do think you have to scare yourself. That's where your creativity or your growth comes from. Scaring yourself, challenging yourself, taking those risks, and not caring about what anyone thinks."
"The best thing about candy is that it can't be spoiled by the adult world. Candy is innocent."
"Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world."
"Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom."
"I don't really believe in writer's block or anything like that. If I'm not feeling words, I may pick up an instrument and play with sounds or delve into different types of creativity and expression."
"I'm encouraging other people, whether they're professionals or not, to use their creativity to express themselves, to get a conversation going, to get the party started, really."
"I think that the people who are the loudest about wanting to change you are the people with the least amount of vision and creativity."
"I have lived on a razors edge. So what if you fall off. I'd rather be doing something I wanted to do. I'd walk it again."
"Creativity requires a lot of pass/fail/start again and it is often hard on the psyche."
"Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself."
"The Creative knows the great beginnings. The Receptive completes the finished things. The Creative is decided and therefore shows to men the easy. The Receptive is yielding and therefore shows to men the simple. Learning is movement from moment to moment."
"If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them....You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted.... You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules."
"Only when men are connected to large, universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity."
"Mathematics is the summit of human thinking. It has all the creativity and imagination that you can find in all kinds of art, but unlike art-charlatans and all kinds of quacks will not succeed there."
"My belief in why America has been doing so well up to now is that we have been propelled by our immigrants and our encouragement of technical innovation and, indeed, creativity across the board."
"Never create anything, it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life."
"Without freedom, creativity cannot flourish. The right to freedom is crucial to progress in any society; and the context is having a sense of global responsibility."
"I like making series, for a couple reasons. One, the repetition of routine is very healthy because I can get a little crazy; I want to be making things all the time. And if I publish something every week, I don't have to put every idea I have into one piece. It's more like, here's one idea: execute it, see it through, think about it, do it the best you can. And then there are going to be ten more ideas that come while you're making that, because creativity works that way."
"In today’s work arena, creativity may be more of an asset than competence."
"In the art world, creativity involves aesthetic sensibility, emotional resonance and a gift for expression."
