71 Awesome Quotes About Creativity

Creativity is intelligence having fun. Albert Einstein

You can be cautious or you can be creative — but there’s no such thing as a cautious creative. George Lois

The chief enemy of creativity is good sense. Pablo Picasso

Creativity is a natural extension of our enthusiasm. Earl Nightingale

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. William Wordsworth

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy… and failure is death. Add to this… the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him… By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating. Pearl S. Buck

You can’t use up creativity, the more you use the more you have. Maya Angelou

To make living itself an art, that is the goal.Henry Miller

Ask yourself: Why am I seeing and feeling this? How am I growing? What am I learning? Remember: Every coincidence is potentially meaningful. How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world.Ansel Adams

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. Steve Jobs

Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it. Dee Hock

Creativity is a habit. It’s not something that happens in the shower. Nick Law

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through. Ira Glass

The thing about creativity is, people are going to laugh at it. Get over it. Twyla Tharp

I hate good taste. It’s the worst thing that can happen to a creative person.Helmut Newton

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness… it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure… Francis Bacon

Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people. Leo Burnett

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself. Alan Alda

Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea. Lou Dorfsman

Creativity is a drug I cannot live without. Cecil B. DeMille

The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. Albert Einstein

To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it. Osho

The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul. Dieter F. Uchtdorf

There’s no such thing as a creative type. As if creative people can just show up and make stuff up. As if it were that easy. I think people need to be reminded that creativity is a verb. A very time consuming verb. It’s about taking an idea in your head and transforming that idea into something real. And that’s always going to be a long and difficult process. If you’re doing it right, it’s going to feel like work.Milton Glaser

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things. Ray Bradbury

Creativity is like washing a pig. It’s messy. It has no rules. No clear beginning, middle or end. It’s kind of a pain in the ass, and when you’re done, you’re not sure if the pig is really clean or even why you were washing a pig in the first place. Luke Sullivan

Creativity is contagious, pass it on. Albert Einstein

Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties. Gail Sheehy

Creativity takes courage. Henry Matisse

Experiencing sadness and anger can make you feel more creative, and by being creative, you can get beyond your pain or negativity. Yoko Ono

Creativity is an act of defiance. Twyla Tharp

That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you. Ray Bradbury

Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas. Donatella Versace

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent into the dark place where it leads. Erica Jong

In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone. Rollo May

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple. Charles Mingus

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do. Steve Martin

By being natural and sincere, one often can create revolutions without having sought them. Christian Dior

The story that we all live is the cycle of creation and destruction, of control and letting go, of picking up the pieces and making something new. Julie Burstein

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

You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star. Friedrich Nietzsche

An idea can turn to dust of magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it. Bill Bernbach

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. Sylvia Plath

I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort and disappointment and perseverance. Vincent Van Gogh

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing. Marc Chagall

The urge to destroy is also a creative urge. Pablo Picasso

Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy. Vincent Van Gogh

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity. Chuck Jones

Dance first, think later. Samuel Beckett

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. Ray Bradbury

To create one’s own world takes courage. Georgia O’ Keeffe

True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found. Eckhart Tolle

It’s easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It’s a lot more difficult to perform one. Chuck Palahniuk

The creative person is willing to live with ambiguity. He doesn’t need problems solved immediately and can afford to wait for the right ideas. Abe Tannenbaum

Think outside the box, collapse the box, and take a f**king sharp knife to it. Bansky

It’s better to dance than to march through life. Yoko Ono

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together. Vincent Van Gogh

Human life is inherently creative. It’s why we all have different résumés. … It’s why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic. Ken Robinson

Life is about creating yourself. Unknown

A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations. Gerald G. Jampolsky

There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns. Edward de Bono

‘Keeing busy’ is the remedy for all the ills in America. It’s also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed. Joyce Carol Oates

To be creative means to connect. It’s to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction. Nawal El Saadawi

Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the ‘creative bug’ is just a wee voice telling you, ‘I’d like my crayons back, please. Hugh MacLeod

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime. Ray Bradbury