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Creativity Quotes

78 quotes about creativity. Every quote shows where it comes from and how far to trust it.

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Most quoted on creativity:

Next to art, or even equal to it, science – that is, producing and testing theories about the world, about reality – seems to me to be the greatest creative enterprise of which men are capable.

Karl Popper The World of Parmenides (2001)

I always stress to my clients that they have to be ready to change. You have to be prepared to make your innovation obsolete. But many companies aren’t prepared to do that.

Peter Drucker

Science has political aspects just like anything else does. And what often happens is the money is flowing in such a way as to discourage innovation.

Robert B. Laughlin

We were created to be creators.

John O'Donohue Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (2003)

I can find Greece and Palestine and Italy and England and the Islands, the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being.

Martin Buber

I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself, and am I only by being not presupposed but posited, and ... only in the moment when I posit myself; that is, I am creator and creature in one.

Max Stirner The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

None of you knows what creativity means. To paint a picture, to write a poem? No! To recast one’s whole age, to impose upon it the stamp of one’s will, to fill it with beauty, to overwhelm it, to overpower it with one’s spirit.

Christian Morgenstern Zarathustra’s Children (2000)

Most often, the idea is a small part of the overall company. That's what has been screwed up with the last 30 years of grant funding. A good idea is not going to help anyone unless it succeeds in getting to the commercialization stage.

Steve Blank

Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.

Brené Brown

The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don’t always get what you thought you were asking for. From this era on, I think invention will be the parent of necessity—and not the other way around.

Vernor Vinge A Deepness in the Sky (1999)

What is underlying Berdyaev's thinking is the fact that the creative impulse must be generated from a dissatisfaction with this world. The creative impulse wishes in its original outburst to see an end to this world; it is the beginning of a different world. In short, creativity is eschatological.

Carnegie Samuel Calian The Significance of Eschatology in the Thoughts of Nicolas Berdyaev (1965)

Many people ... go through life with hardly an original thought; gravitate from one pleasure or amusement to another; gain a livelihood doing what someone else has assigned; flee boredom as best they can; marry and beget children; and then, without having made the slightest difference of any unique significance, die and decay like any animal.

Richard Taylor Restoring Pride: The Lost Virtue of Our Age (1995)

In “The Creative Mind” I set out to show that there exists a single creative activity, which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences. It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind.

Jacob Bronowski Science and Human Values (2011)

True originality is not to be reached by striving after it. A man is original or he is not, as it happens, and as Heaven pleases; but, if he be original, he will be so without knowing it, and his originality will be shown in what we call the whole man, not in an assumed and startling vesture.

Alfred Austin

In men of genius, sterile years precede productive years, these again to be followed by sterility, the barren periods being marked by psychological self-depreciation, by the feeling that they are less than other men; times in which the remembrance of the creative periods is a torment, and when they envy those who go about undisturbed by such penalties. Just as his moments of ecstasy are more poignant, so are the periods of depression of a man of genius more intense than those of other men.

Otto Weininger Sex and Character (1903)

The fact is that originality (unless in minds of very unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation.

Edgar Allan Poe The Philosophy of Composition (1846)

Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël Corinne (1807)

Someone told me that creativity is just learning to do something with a different perspective.

Ben Carson Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (1990)

Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience. Computers simply cannot do that.

Masaru Ibuka Masaru Ibuka in: The Corporate Board (1992)

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