Creativity Quotes

Welcome to the creativity quotes section of the website. On this page, I list interesting quotes that I find during my research on the topic of creativity.

“The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a fad” 
– President of the Michigan Savings bank (When advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in the Ford motor company) 

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” 
-Scott Adams 

“What is genius – but the power of expressing a new individuality?” 

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

“A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.” 
-Jacques Maritain 

“Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys.” 
– Sam Walton 

“Man is an imagining being.” 
– Gaston Bachelard 

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” 
– Charles Mingus 

“There’s no good idea that cannot be improved on.” 
– Michael Eisner 

“One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive one.” 
– Ralph Waldo Emerson 

“Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.” 
– Charles Baudelaire 

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct arising from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves.” 
– Carl Jung 

“We have approximately 60,000 thoughts in a day. Unfortunately, 95% of them are thoughts we had the day before.” 
– Deepak Chopra 

“If you can dream it, you can do it.” 
– Walt Disney 

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” 
– John Steinbeck 

“Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.” 
– Emile Chartier 

“Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.” 
– Jonathan Swift 

More creativity quotes…

“After years of telling corporate citizens to ‘trust the system,’ many companies must relearn instead to trust their people – and encourage their people to use neglected creative capacities in order to tap the most potent economic stimulus of all: idea power.” 
– Rosabeth Moss Kanter 

“You have a coyote inside you and you have to get it out” 
– Chuck Jones (The animator who created Wile E. Coyote, on how to draw one) 

“People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” 
– Daryl F Zanuck (Head of 20th Century Fox commenting on television in 1946) 

“In a real sense, ideas are the lifeblood of organizations and represent their only sustainable competitive advantage. The only way to avoid Why didn’t I think of that? is to think of it first. Creativity is the most critical of all human resources. Without it there would be little progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.” 
– Creativity Consultant Ted Coulson 

“Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.” 
– Alan Alda 

“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.” 
– Mary Lou Cook 

“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will have truly defeated age.” 
– Sophia Loren 

“To be creative, an idea must also be appropriate – useful and actionable. It must somehow influence the way business gets done by improving a product, for instance, or by opening up a new way to approach a process.”
– Teresa M Amabile – Professor Harvard Business School

This creativity quote from psychologist and author R.Keith Sawyer reminds us that creativity isn’t all about luck or those aha moments…

“Take risks, and expect to make lots of mistakes, because creativity is a numbers game. Work hard, and take frequent breaks, but stay with it over time. Do what you love, because creative breakthroughs take years of hard work. Develop a network of colleagues, and schedule time for freewheeling, unstructured discussions. Most of all, forget those romantic myths that creativity is all about being artsy and gifted and not about hard work. They discourage us because we’re waiting for that one full-blown moment of inspiration. And while we’re waiting, we may never start working on what we might someday create.”
– R.Keith Sawyer – Psychologist and Author

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when you only have one idea.

– Emile-Auguste Chartier – French philosopher, journalist, and pacifist

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

– Dr. Howard Thurman (1899 – April 10, 1981)

“Creativity is a step on from imagination. 

You see you could be imaginative all day long and never do anything. 

You know you could be lying in bed being wonderfully imaginative but if nothing happened, nobody would think you were being creative. 

You would never say of somebody, 

“They’re very creative.” 

“Oh really, what do they do?” 

“Nothing. Nothing at all.” To be creative, you have to do something. 

Creativity is a very practical process. 

Creativity is putting your imagination to work. I think of it as applied imagination.”

– Sir Ken Robinson – Author, Speaker

Creativity Quotes From Barbara Januszkiewicz

“Being open to new ideas, new opportunities and new challenges will keep you young and thinking like an artist. As we grow up, slowly we play less with our imagination and dreams. We expect the youth to be more adventuress and as we mature we take fewer risks. As my goal today is to play, just play…and play some more.” 

“Jazz vision is a wordless conversation between musical notes and visual expressions.”

“Liebman’s sound offers me visual expressions in an ever-changing musical palette.”

“Jazz is the art of thinking out loud.”

“Jazz can be a blank canvas full of possibilities.”

“Imagination needs to be fed.”

“Creative thinking inspires ideas. Ideas inspire change.”

“Jazz vision is the fusion of music and art a real paradox of same-yet different. Here we play in exchanges, like the hardness of the key of c# major and from the softness of Db major—- capturing, reflecting and improvising. Jazz vision for me is seeing my art in musical terms.”

“Art matters.”

“Behind every vision, there is an inspiration.”

“There is creative vision in each of us, but sometimes it’s hard to get that creative part started.”

“There are no mistakes in art, only opportunities to be more creative.”

“Seek your creative vision. Be drawn to the arts for it can expand your imagination.”

“Today, change my life.”

“Ideas come to us, not from us.”

“Open your mind. Open your heart, and be a composer that can improvise a harmonic friendship in harmonic colors.”

“Creativity is magic” If you don’t try something new, you are standing still as an artist.”

“Creativity is not being afraid to be different. It takes madness to jump at an idea that no one else believes in.” 

“Midnight torsion, my creative hour. I sometimes become lost in my own labyrinth maze of misdirections.”

“My work grows as a result of experimentation with approaches, materials, and techniques.”. “In this spirit of experimentation, I have found I enjoy the moments of expressing myself with color, lines, shapes. I find true freedom in placing paint on paper.”

“Il y a inspiration, innovation et puis il y a ce qui est possible.”

Creativity Quotes from Charles Kettering

“If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.” 

“99 percent of success is built on failure.” 

“A problem well stated is a problem half solved.” 

“Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.” 

Creativity Quotes from Thomas Alva Edison

“The greatest invention in the world is the mind of a child.” 

“I failed my way to success.” 

Creativity Quotes From Albert Einstein

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” 

“The important thing is not to stop questioning” 

”The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” 

Creativity Quotes from Henry Ford

“If you think you can, or if you think you can’t, you are right” 

“One who fears failure limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again.” 

“I am looking for a lot of people who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.”