Creativity quotes
3.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside creativity — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"On this simple unit-system [of building blocks] ruled on the low table-top all these forms were combined by the child into imaginative patter. Design was recreation! ...The virtue of all this lay in the awakening of the childmind to rhythmic structure in Nature - giving the child a sense of innate cause-and-effect otherwise far beyond child-comprehension."
"For me, psychology and art interact and overlap in so many ways. Psychology is the study of the inner life and creativity comes from the imagination and a response to the environment, as you know. So they're both very similar in that way because it's about one's inner life interacting with the environment and what comes from that."
"Creativity has got to start with humanity."
"Creativity starts with humanity when were being human we feel - joys, sadness, when we're sick, when we're nervous"
"Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you're a human being, you feel, you suffer. You're gay, you're sick, you're nervous or whatever."
"Not since the multiplication of the loaves and fishes near the Sea of Galilee has there been creativity as miraculous as that of the Keystone XL pipeline. It has not yet been built but already is perhaps the most constructive infrastructure project since the Interstate Highway System. It has accomplished an astonishing trifecta"
"Teaching creativity to your child isn't like teaching good manners. No one can paint a masterpiece by bowing to another person's precepts about elbows on the table."
"Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it."
"The focus on creativity and independence exists in pockets of resistance in the educational system, which, to thrive, should be integrated with the needs and concerns of the great majority of the population. One finds them everywhere."
"In my experience at least, the large public universities do not fall behind in fostering creativity and independence; often the contrary."
"In the sciences particularly the large public universities must and do take an active role in fostering creativity and independence; otherwise the fields will wither, and along with them even the aspirations of wealth and power."
"We fritter away our energy and creativity . . . we get bogged down in the thick of thin things."
"If you want to unleash more creativity in your company, you need to allow for a little contamination. It is the sand in the oyster that creates the pearl."
"All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself civilization, in a word is the fruits of the creative artist. It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape."
"Creation and creativity are inextricably linked."
"They were missing all the enthusiasm, the creativity; that whole excitement about the music was lost. A lot of people are really going back looking for that."
"Apple made tools that helped people express their creativity and Steve Jobs knew that so he told that story well. But Facebook makes tools that help people connect and Mark Zuckerberg is hardly a story-teller. Nevertheless, he's become a leader because his products do such a good job of solving a problem."
"I'm 36 and if I met a woman of my own age and married her, I'd also be marrying her former life, her past. It might be OK for some people - I don't want to judge it or anything - but it's not for me. It would destroy my creativity."
"And he who must be a creator in good and evil: verily, he must be an annihilator first and demolish values."
"Pain makes hens and poets cackle."
