Creativity Quotes

I-Ching ~
• “All day long the superior man is creatively active.”

Maya Angelou ~
• “Creativity is like electricity. We don't understand how it works ... we just use it.”

L. Frank Baum ~
• “The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization.”

Henri Bergson ~
• “There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.”
• “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”

Buddha ~
• “It is your mind that creates this world.”

Thomas Carlyle ~
• “Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.”

Joseph Conrad ~
• “All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind, pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality.” Henry James - An Appreciation (1905)

Mary Daly ~
• “It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.”

Loren Eiseley ~
• “The creative element in the mind of man . . . emerges in as mysterious a fashion as those elementary particles which leap into momentary existence in great cyclotrons, only to vanish again like infinitesimal ghosts.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt ~
• “Once the amateur's naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it. Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur.”

Frantz Fanon ~
• “In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.”

Erich Fromm ~
• “Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”
• “Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.”

Zona Gale ~
• “Loving, like prayer, is a power as well as a process. It's curative. It is creative.”

Nadine Gordimer ~
• “The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne ~
• “I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.” ~ Mosses from and Old Manse

Friedensreich Hundertwasser ~
• “In order to be happy, man does not need mechanical energy, but internal creative energy.”
• “Nuclear energy, too, this final aberration in the history of mankind, was only possible because the focus is only on the seemingly rational. Moral-aesthetic values are missing, and the link between man and creation, which is represented by art. Without art, without the creative, there is nothing.”

Ernest Jones ~
• “Creativity not committed to public purpose is merely therapy or ego satisfaction.”

Carl Jung ~
• “As long as we ourselves are caught up in the process of creation, we neither see nor understand; indeed we ought not to understand, for nothing is more injurious to immediate experience than cognition. But for the purpose of cognitive understanding we must detach ourselves from the creative process and look at it from the outside; only then does it become an image that expresses what we are bound to call ‘meaning’.” On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry, 1922, CW 15: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature, p121

• “The psyche creates reality every day."

[more Jung Quotes]

• Marie-Louise von Franz ~
“Creativity sometimes needs the protection of darkness, of being ignored. That is very obvious in the natural tendency many artists and writers have not to show their paintings or writings before they are finished.”

Marion Woodman ~
• “If we fail to nourish our souls, they wither, and without soul,
life ceases to have meaning. The creative process shrivels in the absence of continual dialogue with the soul. And creativity is what makes life worth living.”

Franz Kafka ~
• “By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. ~
• “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”
• “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.” Nonviolence and Racial Justice, 6 February 1957, Chicago, IL
• “You must not become morbidly absorbed in a past mistake but you must seek to outlive it by creative living in the future.” Advice for Living, Ebony, June 1958, Chicago, IL

[more King quotes]

Arthur Koestler ~
• “Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.”
• “True creativity often starts where language ends.”

Ursula K. Le Guin ~
• “The creative adult is the child who has survived.”

Madeleine L'Engle ~
• “Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.”

R. D. Laing ~
• “Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.”

Doris Lessing ~
• “I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.”

Thomas Mann ~
• “An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”
• “One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.”

Henri Matisse ~
• “It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power to an inborn talent. In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome. The artist begins with a vision — a creative operation requiring an effort. Creativity takes courage.” ~ In Art

Rollo May ~
• “Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.”
• “Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death.”

Maria Montessori ~
• “Life makes itself manifest, – life creates, life gives: – and is in its turn held within certain limits and bound by certain laws which are insuperable.” The Montessori Method, chapter 4 [more Montessori quotes]

Robert Motherwell ~
• “It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it.”

Lewis Mumford ~
• “The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.”

Louise Nevelson ~
• “You must create your own world. I'm responsible for my world.”
• “I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within.”
• “I never feel age ... If you have creative work, you don't have age or time.”

Anais Nin ~
• “Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.”

Paracelsus ~
• “Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow.”

Jean Piaget ~
• “The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done - men who are creative, inventive and discoverers.”

Pablo Picasso ~
• “Good taste is the enemy of creativity.”

Sylvia Plath ~
• “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

Otto Rank ~
• “The new meaning of soul is creativity and mysticism. These will become the foundation of the new psychological type and with him or her will come the new civilization.”

Sir Ken Robinson ~
• “My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”
• “I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value.”
• “If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. People are being educated out of their creative capacity. We do not grow into creativity, we grow out of it. As far as education for children, we need to educate their whole being. Picasso said “All children are born artists.” How do we remain artists as we grow up?”

Carl Rogers ~
• “The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.”

Theodore Roszak ~
• “It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought.”

Salman Rushdie ~
• “Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling ~
• “All rules for study are summed up in this one: learn only in order to create.”

Rabindranath Tagore ~
• “Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it.”
• “What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.”

Ida M. Tarbell ~
• “Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ~
• “Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.” [more Teilhard quotes]

Alma Woodsey Thomas ~
• “Creative art is for all time and is therefore independent of time. It is of all ages, of every land, and if by this we mean the creative spirit in man which produces a picture or a statue is common to the whole civilized world, independent of age, race and nationality; the statement may stand unchallenged.”

Mark Tobey ~
• “The dimension that counts for the creative person is the space he creates within himself. This inner space is closer to the infinite than the other, and it is the privilege of the balanced mind ... and the search for an equilibrium is essential - to be as aware of inner space as he is of outer space.”

John Updike ~
• “Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”

Mario Vargas Llosa ~
• “You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.”