quotations about creativity
A creative person is someone who imagines what other people cannot. Their value to us lies in expanding our own possibilities. Walls fall. We break out.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
blog, Dec. 2000
Create or perish is the eternal mandate of nature. Be constructive or become frustrated is an equal demand. You cannot escape the conclusion that whatever this thing is which is seeking expression through everything, it can find satisfactory outlet only through constructive and life-giving creativeness.
ERNEST HOLMES
This Thing Called You
Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.
ANTHONY BURGESS
attributed, Webster's Quotations
Creativity is one of the most positive, life-affirming traits of humanity, and people in all walks of life report that they feel at their peek and in flow when they are being their most creative.
ROBERT KEITH SAWYER
Explaining Creativity
Broken symmetry is imperfection, but rich in creativity. The universe is created out of broken symmetry.
AMIT RAY
Meditation: Insights and Inspiration
To me, creativity is a vision and the actualization of that vision. This vision is a unit; it is complete and pregnant. Just as night gives birth to day, the seed to a plant, an ovum to a child; so too a creative vision gives birth indefinitely and its actualization produces scientific, artistic or religious forms.
A. REZA ARASTEH & J. D. ARASTEH
Creativity in the Life-cycle
Creativity is a potent element of individual life experience and is the soil at the root of much of human progress and endeavour.
MICHAEL A. WEST
Developing Creativity in Organizations
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
attributed, Zarathustra's Children
Creativity is the ability to see relationships where none exist.
THOMAS DISCH
attributed, Creativity and Personality Type
Human creativity uses what is already existing and available and changes it in unpredictable ways.
SYLVANO ARIETI
Creativity: The Magic Synthesis
Creativity follows its own rules.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
True creativity often starts where language ends.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
The Act of Creation
Creativity is purposeful and involves effort to make something work, to make something better, more meaningful, or more beautiful.
ALANE J. STARKO
Creativity in the Classroom
Creativity is a condition of our species. We invent procedures, alter behaviors, develop new systems, and create new knowledge to increase our likelihood of survival and fulfillment. Human creativity is an extension or another expression of our biological imperative to procreate.
MARCI SEGAL
Creativity and Personality Type
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in art, in music, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
JOHN STEINBECK
East of Eden
Creativity means learning where the rules exist, and then breaking them! Saying, "It's better this way." But you have to know the rules in order to break them with any grace.
ALAN ARKIN
New Mexico Magazine, Jun. 2011
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
A Writer's Diary, May 11, 1920
The fear of being wrong is the prime inhibitor of the creative process.
ROBERTA JEAN BRYANT
Anybody Can Write
Creativity can replace conformity as the primary mode of social being.... We can cling to that which is passing, or has already passed, or we can remain accessible to--even surrender to--the creative process, without insisting that we know in advance the ultimate outcome for us, our institutions, or our planet. To accept this challenge is to cherish freedom, to embrace life, and to find meaning.
STEPHEN NACHMANOVITCH
Free Play
Creativity is not simply originality and unlimited freedom. There is much more to it than that. Creativity also imposes restrictions. While it uses methods other than those of ordinary thinking, it must not be in disagreement with ordinary thinking--or rather, it must be something that, sooner or later, ordinary thinking will understand, accept, and appreciate. Otherwise the result would be bizarre, not creative.
SYLVANO ARIETI
Creativity: The Magic Synthesis