Whether you’re an artist, entrepreneur, or just seeking a creative boost, these creativity quotes will become your go-to!
My Favorite Picks From Quotes About Creativity
1. “Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources” ― C.E.M. Joad
2. “Creativity takes courage. ” ― Henri Matisse
3. “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” ― Pablo Picasso
4. “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” ― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
5. “The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.” ― Pablo Picasso
6. “The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.” ― Leonardo da Vinci
7. “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
8. “I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking” ― Albert Einstein
9. “Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” ― Henry Thomas Buckle
10. “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.” ― Brene Brown
Inspirational Quotes About Creativity
1. “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young
2. “Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” ― Rumi, The Essential Rumi
3. “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious…and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” ― Walt Disney Company
See also: 210 Inspiring Keep Pushing Quotes To Unleash Your Power
4. “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.” ― Martha Graham
5. “You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.” ― Steve Jobs
6. “There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.” ― Coco Chanel
7. “Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.” ― Brenda Ueland
8. “There is creative reading as well as creative writing.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
9. “The knowledge of all things is possible” ― Leonardo da Vinci
10. “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” ― Scott Adams
11. “Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.” ― Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
12. “If you ever find that you’re the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.” ― Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
13. “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.” ― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
14. “It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.” ― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man
15. “Creative people are often found either disagreeable or intimidating by mediocrities.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
16. “All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.” ― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
17. “Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.” ― Richard Buckminster Fuller
18. “Mr. Freeman sighs. “No imagination. What are you thirteen? Fourteen? You’ve already let them beat your creativity out of you!” ― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
19. “When you have wit of your own, it’s a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
20. “What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul.” ― Deepak Chopra, Life After Death: The Burden of Proof
21. “Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our integrity and awareness, the more original and creative our time will become.” ― John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings
22. “Remember: It costs nothing to encourage an artist, and the potential benefits are staggering. A pat on the back to an artist now could one day result in your favorite film, or the cartoon you love to get stoned watching, or the song that saves your life. Discourage an artist, you get absolutely nothing in return, ever.” ― Kevin Smith, Tough Shit: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good
23. “As Aristotle said, ‘Excellence is a habit.’ I would say furthermore that excellence is made constant through the feeling that comes right after one has completed a work which he himself finds undeniably awe-inspiring. He only wants to relax until he’s ready to renew such a feeling all over again because to him, all else has become absolutely trivial.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
24. “We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.” ― Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions
25. “There is no healthier drug than creativity.” ― Nayyirah Waheed, Salt
26. “The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.” ― Arthur Koestler
27. “The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.” ― Banksy
28. “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.” ― Jim Jarmusch
29. “People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living in Paris for ten years and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.” ― Roman Payne, Crepuscule
30. “Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.” ― Arthur Koestler, Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955-1967
See also: 110 Heart Touching Quotes For Teachers To Celebrate Them
Famous Quotes About Creativity
1. “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” ― Albert Einstein
2. “Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. ” ― Pablo Picasso, Pablo Picasso: Metamorphoses of the Human Form : Graphic Works, 1895-1972
3. “There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun” ― Pablo Picasso
4. “Doors are for people with no imagination.” ― Derek Landy, Skulduggery Pleasant
5. “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” ― Maya Angelou
6. “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.” ― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
See also: 210 Best Quotes About Courage To Unleash Your Inner Hero
7. “Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don’t come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they’re having a piss.” ― Banksy, Banging Your Head Against A Brick Wall
8. “I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.” ― Gustave Flaubert
9. “People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.” ― Karl Lagerfeld
10. “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.” ― Mikhail Bakunin
11. “For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
12. “Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the ‘creative bug’ is just a wee voice telling you, ‘I’d like my crayons back, please.” ― Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
13. “Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity” ― T.S. Eliot
14. “Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.” ― Henry David Thoreau
15. “That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.” ― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You
16. “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.” ― Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parliament of Birds
17. “Creativity is an act of defiance.” ― Twyla Tharp
18. “When I am ….. completely myself, entirely alone… or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these ideas come I know not nor can I force them.” ― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
19. “The question is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.
20. “Creativity is as important as literacy” ― Ken Robinson
21. “Create with the heart; build with the mind.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
22. “Fashion is a language that creates itself in clothes to interpret reality.” ― Karl Lagerfeld
23. “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” ― Marshall McLuhan
24. “The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake.” ― Roman Payne
25. “Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.” ― Beatrix Potter
26. “Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.” ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
27. “But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.” ― Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water
28. “People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on. There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.” ― Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales
29. “When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you’re writing about at the time. ” ― Lady Gaga
30. “If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.” ― Pablo Picasso
Quotes About Being Creative
1. “Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” ― Erich Fromm
2. “life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one” ― Stella Adler
3. “There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.” ― Sophia Loren
4. “Everyone has their own ways of expression. I believe we all have a lot to say, but finding ways to say it is more than half the battle.” ― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile
5. “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” ― Albert Einstein
6. “I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.” ― Marcel Duchamp
7. “If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.” ― Hilary Mantel
8. “Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.” ― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
9. “A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
10. “Chance favors the prepared mind.” ― Louis Pasteur
11. “The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing. ” ― Ernest Hemingway
12. “True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.” ― Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations
13. “To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.” ― Akira Kurosawa
14. “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” ― Joseph Chilton Pearce
15. “It’s easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It’s a lot more difficult to perform one.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
16. “Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest.” ― Mike Norton, White Mountain
See also: 110 Insightful Quotes About Legends That Inspire Greatness
17. “I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.” ― Marcus Tullius Cicero
18. “I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
19. “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” ― George Bernard Shaw
20. “I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.” ― Madonna
21. “Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.” ― Red Haircrow
22. “This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.” ― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle
23. “Everyone pretends to be ‘free thinkers’, but few individuals pass the line into expressive territories that may be detrimental to their own social well-being.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
24. “You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.” ― Lewis Carroll
25. “Creative power is mightier than its possessor.” ― C.G. Jung
26. “Imitation is suicide.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
27. “You cannot reconcile creativeness with technical achievement. You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter…having lost the song, we pursue the singer. We learn from the singer the technique of song, but there is no song; and I say the song is essential, the joy of singing is essential. When the joy is there, the technique can be built up from nothing; you will invent your own technique, you won’t have to study elocution or style. When you have, you see, and the very seeing of beauty is an art.” ― Jiddu Krishnamurti
28. “I love classic beauty. It’s an idea of beauty with no standard.” ― Karl Lagerfeld
29. “The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” ― Robert Henri
30. “Creativity is a continual surprise.” ― Ray Bradbury
Quotes About Creating Something Wonderful
1. “The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.” ― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
2. “The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that
without the creation of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.” ― Pearl S. Buck
3. “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince
4. “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” ― Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything
5. “The inner fire is the most important thing mankind possesses.” ― Edith Södergran
See also: Andrew Tate Quotes That Will Spark Your Inner Winner
6. “I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.” ― Ernest Hemingway
7. “I think that you’ve got to make something that pleases you and hope that other people feel the same way.” ― Thomas Keller
8. “The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible” ― William S. Burroughs
9. “There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.
There are not more than five primary colors, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen.
There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of them yield more flavors than can ever be tasted.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
10. “Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.” ― John Waters
11. “Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.” ― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
See also: 150 River Quotes That Will Remind You To Go With The Flow
12. “The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.” ― G.K. Chesterton, The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery
13. “A good traveler is one who knows how to travel with the mind.” ― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes
14. “When learning is purposeful, creativity blossoms. When creativity blossoms, thinking emanates. When thinking emanates, knowledge is fully lit. When knowledge is lit, economy flourishes.” ― A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Indomitable Spirit
15. “Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist.
To make living itself an art, that is the goal.” ― Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
16. “You become more divine as you become more creative. All the religions of the world have said God is the creator. I don’t know whether he is the creator or not, but one thing I know: the more creative you become, the more godly you become. When your creativity comes to a climax, when your whole life becomes creative, you live in God. So he must be the creator because people who have been creative have been closest to him. Love what you do. Be meditative while you are doing it – whatsoever it is” ― Osho
17. “If critics say your work stinks it’s because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered “dangerous” but set in place in their compartmental understandings.” ― Jack Kerouac
18. “Be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else–that’s how you’ll get ahead.” ― Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
19. “Non-judgment quiets the internal dialogue, and this opens once again the doorway to creativity.” ― Deepak Chopra
20. “To create art with all the passion in one’s soul is to live art with all the beauty in one’s heart.” ― Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
21. “The professor leaned forward. “But there’s nothing more profound than creating something out of nothing.” Her lovely face turned fierce. “Think about it Cath. That’s what makes a god—or a mother. There’s nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself.” ― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
22. “When you become the image of your own imagination, it’s the most powerful thing you could ever do.” ― RuPaul
23. “I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. (…) Boredom opens up the space for new engagements. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are.” ― Slavoj Žižek
24. “In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.” ― Anais Nin
25. “Critique by creating.” ― Michelangelo Buonarroti
26. “Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Improvise. Become more creative. Not because you have to, but because you want to. Evolution is the secret for the next step.” ― Karl Lagerfeld
27. “Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
28. “In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.” ― Rollo May
29. “But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration? You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came into that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. “Good for you, man” a man once said to me at a party, “you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ em dead.” ― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
30. “Absurdity and anti—absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.” ― Karl Lagerfeld
Motivational Quotes About Creativity
1. “Creativity arises from our ability to see things from many different angles.” ― Keri Smith, How to Be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum
2. “Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayermaking, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between-worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts.” ― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
3. “Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.” ― Brendan Francis Brown
4. “Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long.” ― Leonard Bernstein
5. “We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.” ― Edward de Bono
6. “Supposedly there’s an actual, researched link between extreme creativity and mental illness, and I believe it because I’ve seen it with my own eyes.” ― Deb Caletti, Wild Roses
7. “Create. Not for the money. Not for the fame. Not for the recognition. But for the pure joy of creating something and sharing it.” ― Ernest Barbaric
8. “Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.” ― Jyrki Vainonen
9. “Think of yourself as a brand. You need to be remembered. What will they remember you for? What defines you? If you have it in you, do something that defines you. Invent something, develop a unique skill, get noticed for something — it creates a talking point.” ― Chris Arnold
10. “The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain.” ― Nikola Tesla, My Inventions
11. “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.” ― Mario Vargas Llosa
12. “To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.” ― Lawrence Clark Powell
13. “My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life.” ― Miles Davis
14. “If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine–why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women’s creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as ‘irrelevant’?” ― May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
15. “Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order” ― Virginia Woolf
16. “Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. . . Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.” ― Maya Angelou
17. “The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
18. “It’s an artist’s right to rebel against the world’s stupidity.” ― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly,
19. “Everyone who has taken a shower has had an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it that makes a difference.” ― Nolan Bushnell
20. “Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.” ― Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words
21. “Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new film, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul.” ― Jim Jarmusch
See also: Brilliant List Of 120 Light Quotes To Awaken Your Mind
22. “The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur. That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you’re already doing. Thinking more about what their needs are, and responding accordingly. Avoid the dullards; avoid the folk who play it safe. They can’t help you anymore. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct, they are extinction.” ― Hugh MacLeod
23. “On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.” ― Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet
24. “The closer you come to knowing that you alone create the world of your experience, the more vital it becomes for you to discover just who is doing the creating.” ― Eric Micha’el Leventhal
25. “Get out of your mind and become crazy about your future in a creative way!” ― Michael Bassey Johnson
26. “There are some people who live in a dream world, and some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.” ― Douglas Everett
27. “When you aren’t satisfied with what has already been done, make something better. That is the greatest responsibility and the true freedom of creativity. The freedom is in that it doesn’t need to complain.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
28. “Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains.” ― Henri Bergson
29. “That’s creativity in a nutshell. A messy tug-of-war with imagination to erase that feeling that nothing really matters anyway.” ― Zoe Whittall, Holding Still for as Long as Possible
30. “Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.” ― Max Ernst
Quotes On Creativity That Will Leave You Thinking
1. “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” ― Oscar Wilde
2. “To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.” ― Osho
See also: 120 Dance Quotes To Inspire Your Inner Dancer
3. “Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, 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
4. “It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom. Without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.” ― Albert Einstein
5. “You have to do stuff that average people don’t understand because those are the only good things.” ― Andy Warhol
See also: 150 Best Taking Risk Quotes To Embrace Courageous Choices
6. “All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions” ― Leonardo Da Vinci
7. “Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” ― Andy Warhol
8. “Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” ― Charles Baudelaire, BAUDELAIRE – the Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
9. “Let your creative and imaginative mind run freely; it will take you places you never dreamed of and provide breakthroughs that others once thought were impossible.” ― Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability
10. “I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.” ― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms
11. “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” ― Marcel Duchamp
12. “The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.” ― Federico García-Lorca
13. “You don’t make art out of good intentions.” ― Gustave Flaubert
14. “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.
15. “Clear thinking at the wrong moment can stifle creativity.” ― Karl Lagerfeld
16. “To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head – and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It’s an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that’s not the most important thing. It’s the work itself.” ― Alan Moore
17. “People like you must create. If you don’t create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.” ― Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette
18. “As you take the normal opportunities of your daily life and create something of beauty and helpfulness, you improve not only the world around you but also the world within you.” ― Dieter F. Uchtdorf
19. “I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.” ― J.K. Rowling
20. “Creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.” ― Sir Ken Robinson
21. “Is there magic in this world? Certainly! But it is not the kind of magic written about in fantasy stories. It is the kind of magic that comes from ideas and the hard work it often takes to make them real. ” ― Robert Fanney
22. “The truth is that creative activity is one that involves the entire self – our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds.” ― Robert Greene, Mastery
23. “Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.” ― Rita Mae Brown
24. “And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. ” ― Alice Walker
25. “Routine kills creative thought.” ― Scarlett Thomas, PopCo
26. “Life in itself has no meaning. Life is an opportunity to create meaning.” ― Osho, Creativity: Unleashing Forces within
27. “When the creative impulse sweeps over you, grab it. You grab it and honor it and use it, because momentum is a rare gift.” ― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful
28. “Originality is the best form of rebellion.” ― Mike Sasso, Being Human: Everything you didn’t want to know about life.
29. “It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them — with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them …” ― Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings
30. “We nurture our creativity when we release our inner child. Let it run and roam free. It will take you on a brighter journey.” ― Serina Hartwell
Final Word
I hope that you have found the perfect quotes about creativity that lifted you up.
Keep the creative sparks flying, stay inspired, and continue to work on your creative side. Make sure that your inspiration doesn’t end here.
Let your creativity roam freely, and may your work be forever touched by the magic of creative inspiration.
