quotations about creativity
The search for knowledge about creativity is linked with magic, the demonic, and the divine, yet such knowledge is at the forefront of rational inquiry. Creativity is paradoxical and complex, and the most steadfast investigator is constantly beset with feelings of awe and a sense of mystery as he pursues his inquiry. Creativity encompasses the magical incantations and drawings of primitive man, the appearance of new forms in nature, and the evil genius of Faust. It is a human capacity but it seems to transcend human capacities.
ALBERT ROTHENBERG
The Creativity Question
God rested when he had left his creative power to itself in man.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Reflections
The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
AGNES DE MILLE
attributed, Witty Words from Wise Women
Man owes his success to his creativity. No one doubts the need for it. It is most useful in good times and essential in bad.
EDWARD DE BONO
Lateral Thinking for Management
In creating, the only hard thing's to begin;
A grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak,
If you've once found the way you've achieved the grand stroke.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Emerson
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
The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Forbes Magazine, Sep. 15, 1974
Creativity perpetually invents itself.
PAUL PALNIK
Creative Consciousness
Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
SCOTT ADAMS
The Dilbert Principle
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
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
The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.
ANAIS NIN
The Novel of the Future
Creativity is a conceptual, abstracted system. It is not tangible, but many of its products are. Creative people work in the tangible world, producing real products.
WILLIAM G. COVINGTON
JR., Creativity and General Systems Theory
Without freedom, there is no creation.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
On Freedom
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
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 is not to be located in one state of mind, one room, one type of person, one individual. Rather it lies in the transition points between different ways of thinking. If we close the doors, we will never hear the full story.
CHRIS BILTON
Management and Creativity
Creativity follows its own rules.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
Creative power is that receptive attitude of expectancy which makes a mold into which the plastic and as yet undifferentiated substance can flow and take the desired form.
THOMAS TROWARD
The Creative Process in the Individual
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