Quote Of The Day Archives: Creativity

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts;
and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

An idea is salvation by imagination. -- Frank Lloyd Wright

We're not talking about historical accuracy, we're talking about art. I've set in motion a geometric inevitability. If I start chiseling there, chipping here, the whole form is compromised. -- David Assael

Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. -- Rita Mae Brown

We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys. -- Eric Hoffer

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

The essence of all creativity is kindness. -- Bill Purdin

It's not about the writing. It's about the feelings behind the words.
-- Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
-- Joseph Chilton Pearce

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches. -- Rainer Maria Rilke

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. -- Linus Pauling

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape... -- Pablo Picasso

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. -- Mark Twain

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
-- Samuel Johnson

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats. -- Howard Aiken

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. -- Mark Twain

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none. -- Ben Shahn

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. -- Henry Ward Beecher

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence. -- Norman Podhoretz

Everything you can imagine is real. -- Pablo Picasso

If an artist sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting what he sees before him. -- Caspar David Friedrich

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. -- Carl Jung

Simplicity is the peak of civilization. -- Jessie Sampter

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
-- Henry David Thoreau

If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day. -- John A. Wheeler

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
-- Mark Twain

So you see, imagination needs moodling -- long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering. -- Brenda Ueland

It is just the little touches after the average man would quit that make the master's fame. -- Orison Swett Marden

The vitality of thought is in adventure. -- Alfred North Whitehead

We must accept that this creative pulse within us is God's creative pulse itself.
-- Joseph Chilton Pearce

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.
-- Tom Bissell

Imitation is suicide. -- Marva Collins

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing. -- Meister Eckhart

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. -- Edgar Allan Poe

There's no correlation between creativity and equipment ownership. None. Zilch. Nada. Actually, as the artist gets more into his thing, and as he gets more successful, his number of tools tends to go down. He knows what works for him.
Expending mental energy on stuff wastes time. -- Hugh Macleod

Art is either plagiarism or revolution. -- Paul Gauguin

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
-- John F. Kennedy

Every artist was first an amateur. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent. -- Isaac Newton

Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance. -- John Keats

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost. -- Isak Dineson

Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you. -- Henri-Frédéric Amiel

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
-- Dorothy (Rothschild) Parker

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James

Genius is the art of nonhabitual thought. -- William James

Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle. -- Ken Hakuta

What is man but his passion? – Robert Penn Warren

The secret of true genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age,
which means never losing your enthusiasm.-- Aldous Huxley

If you can dream it, you can do it. -- Walt Disney

I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way. -- Carl Sandburg

One of the most wicked destructive forces...is unused creative power.... If someone has a creative gift and out of laziness, or for some other reason, doesn't use it, the psychic energy turns to pure poison. That's why we often diagnose neuroses and psychotic diseases as not-lived higher possibilities. -- Marie-Louise Von Frantz

It is always safe to assume, not that the old way is wrong, but that there may be a better way. -- Henry F. Harrower

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift; the rational mind is faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
-- Albert Einstein

The only thing that has ever made me feel old is those times where I allow myself to be predictable. -- Carlos Santana

...we must stop equating sanity with conformity, eccentricity with craziness, and normalcy with numbers. We must get in touch with our own liberating ludicrousness and practice being harmlessly deviant.
-- Sarah J. McCarthy in "Why Johnny Can't Disobey"

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement. -- John Stuart Mill

The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things-ancient history, nineteenth century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later, or six months, or six years. But he has faith that it will happen. -- Carl Ally

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead. -- Aldous Huxley

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. -- Herman Melville

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when you grow up
-- Pablo Picasso

Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish. -- Michelangelo

An idea is salvation by imagination. -- Frank Lloyd Wright

One must have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Have you ever seen an inchworm crawl up a leaf or a twig, and then, clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something, to reach something? That's like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have footing. -- Albert P. Ryder

Whoever wants to see a brick must look at its pores, and must keep his eyes close to it. But whoever wants to see a cathedral cannot see it as he sees a brick. This demands a respect for distance. -- Jose Ortega y Gasset

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. - Carl Sagan

To know is nothing at all, to imagine is everything. -- Anonymous

Contentment: The smother of invention. -- Ethel Mumford

If you want a good idea, get a lot of ideas. -- Linus Pauling

For every positive creative action there is a nearly equal and opposite negative destructive reaction. -- Bill Purdin

No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
-- Victor Marie Hugo

Ideas came to me as they do to all of us. The difference is that I took them seriously. I didn't get discouraged that others didn't see what I saw. I had trust and confidence in my perceptions, rather than listening to dogma and what other people thought. I didn't allow anyone to discourage me -- and everyone tried. But life is not a popularlity contest.
-- Dr. Jonan Salk, discoverer of the vaccine for polio and author of "The Survival of the Wisest," the outline for the cure for cancer.

It takes courage to be creative. Just as soon as you have a new idea, you are a minority of one. -- E. Paul Torrance

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow.
-- Charles Brower

Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working. -- Pablo Picasso

When Pablo Picasso was 85, he was asked why his later paintings were more innovative than his earlier ones. How could the later paintings have more of the boldness and fire of a young artist's work? Picasso reply was, "It takes a long time to become young." -- Father John Catoir