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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"Creativity itself doesn't care at all about results - the only thing it craves is the process. Learn to love the process and let whatever happens next happen, without fussing too much about it. Work like a monk, or a mule, or some other representative metaphor for diligence. Love the work. Destiny will do what it wants with you, regardless."
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
"The internet explodes when somebody has the creativity to look at a piece of data that's put there for one reason and realise they can connect it with something else."
"I just close my eyes and act like I'm a 3-year-old. I try to get as close to a childlike level as possible because we were all artists back then. So you just close your eyes and think back to when you were as young as you can remember and had the least barriers to your creativity."
"The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands."
"A conditioned mind may be inventive; it may think up new ideas, new phrases, new gadgets; it may build a dam, plan a new society, and all the rest of it; but that is not creativity. Creativity is something much more than the mere capacity to acquire a technique. It is because this extraordinary thing called creativity is not in most of us that we are so shallow, empty, insufficient. And only the mind that is free can be creative."
"In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed."
"Where resources are plentiful (i.e. no constraints), you will find very little creativity. Where resources are scarce (i.e. many constraints), you will find an abundance of creativity."
"Creativity is often blocked by trying to be perfect. Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."
"Creativity is an attempt to resolve a conflict generated by unexpressed biological impulses, such that unfulfilled desires are the driving force of the imagination, and they fuel our dreams and daydreams."
"The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable."
"Creativity sometimes needs the protection of darkness, of being ignored. That is very obvious in the natural tendency many artists and writers have not to show their paintings or writings before they are finished."
"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."
"Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only what you are expecting to give — which is everything. What you will receive in return varies. But it really has no connection with what you give. You give because you love and cannot help giving."
"For me and my family personally, September 11 was a reminder that life is fleeting, impermanent, and uncertain. Therefore, we must make use of every moment and nurture it with affection, tenderness, beauty, creativity, and laughter."
"My work is always better when I am alone and follow my own impressions."
"I think that in order to struggle you have to be creative. In my life, creativity has been something that has sustained me; it awoke my spiritual struggle."
"How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure."
"Originality is nothing but judicious plagiarism."
"Human creativity is unlimited. It is the capacity of humans to make things happen which didn't happen before. Creativity provides the key to solving our social and economic problems."
