CREATIVITY QUOTES V

quotations about creativity

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 in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.

LOU DORFSMAN

attributed, Wisdom for the Soul


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


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


Human creativity uses what is already existing and available and changes it in unpredictable ways.

SYLVANO ARIETI

Creativity: The Magic Synthesis


As the world of creativeness finds itself at the outset placed in the midst of opposition and bound at the same time to proceed on its own course, then it becomes clear that this new world when it becomes a whole and governs all cannot remain permanently within the realm of such stubborn opposites: it must, without giving up its independence, yet return to the world which it had left behind and must attempt to penetrate into it; it must do this most of all on account of the fact that its own development is at stake, for only by some such understanding with things outside itself only by means of a struggle with its oppositions can the life of creativeness in man find its way from the great outlines of its ideal-plan to a full and essential development.

RUDOLF EUCKEN

Knowledge and Life


Creativity is Evolution...
Fashioning a growing idea,
Designing progress to arrive at a pier.

ALFREDA DOYLE

Poetry about Creativity


Creativity is the ability to see relationships where none exist.

THOMAS DISCH

attributed, Creativity and Personality Type


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


True creativity often starts where language ends.

ARTHUR KOESTLER

The Act of Creation


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


Creativity is a puzzle, a paradox, some say a mystery. Inventors, scientists, and artists rarely know how their ideas arise. They mention intuition, but cannot say how it works. Most psychologists cannot tell us much about it either. What's more, many people assume that there will never be a scientific theory of creativity--for how could science possibly explain fundamental novelties? As if all this were not daunting enough, the apparent unpredictability of creativity seems to outlaw any systemic explanation whether scientific or historical.

MARGARET BODEN

Dimensions of Creativity


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 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 follows its own rules.

BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON

The Butlerian Jihad


The fear of being wrong is the prime inhibitor of the creative process.

ROBERTA JEAN BRYANT

Anybody Can Write


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


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


Properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten.

WILLIAM BERNBACH

Bill Bernbach Said...


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