Creativity Quotes, Sayings
These creativity quotes will provide you with the inspiration and spark to take on your next great work.
We’ve collected the best quotes and sayings from famous artists, writers, philosophers, scientists, and entrepreneurs on the topic. Use their words to motivate yourself and unleash your creativity to the world.
Best creativity quotes for inspiring innovation
Use these words to inspire creative pursuits like art, design, painting, writing, music, and poetry. You’ll find these words also apply to creative hobbies like cooking, yoga, gardening, and more.
1. Ten Best “Creativity is” Quotes
Let’s start with ten quotes that describe what creativity is.
1.) Creativity is intelligence having fun.
Albert Einstein
2.) Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.
Mary Lou Cook
3.) Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams
4.) Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.
James Russell Lowell
5.) Creativity makes a leap, then looks to see where it is.
Mason Cooley
6.) Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.
George Lois
7.) Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.
Dorothy Parker
8.) Creativity is an act of defiance.
Twyla Tharp
9.) Creativity is just connecting things.
Steve Jobs
10.) Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.
Osho
2. Creativity quotes about innovation
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
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
Invention is the most important product of man’s creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Nikola Tesla
Creativity: the art of not trying, the art of letting go.
Maxime Lagacé
Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.
David Lynch
The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.
Anthony Jay
About motivation
Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create.
Roy T. Bennett
A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
Ayn Rand
Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t “try” to do things. You simply “must” do things.
Ray Bradbury
If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.
Jimmy Buffett
Creative thinking — in terms of idea creativity — is not a mystical talent. It is a skill that can be practiced and nurtured.
Edward de Bono
About courage
We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.
Bob Ross
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
Kurt Vonnegut
Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.
Rita Mae Brown
Nothing is more creative nor destructive than a brilliant mind with a purpose.
Dan Brown
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.
Sylvia Plath
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.
Jim Jarmusch
Creativity quotes about inspiration
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
You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.
Jack London
Whenever there is inspiration and enthusiasm there is a creative empowerment that goes far beyond what a mere person is capable of.
Eckhart Tolle
Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas.
Donatella Versace
Creativity doesn’t wait for that perfect moment. It fashions its own perfect moments out of ordinary ones.
Bruce Garrabrandt
I believe that the most important single thing, beyond discipline and creativity, is daring to dare.
Maya Angelou
Be creative, be useful, be practical, be generous and finish big.
Lisa Genova
About taking risks
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
Oscar Wilde
If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.
Ken Robinson
An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.
Edwin Land
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
Pablo Picasso
Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.
Brene Brown
Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.
Rumi
Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.
Pablo Picasso
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
Unleash creativity quotes
Creativity could be described as letting go of certainties.
Gail Sheehy
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
If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.
Ray Bradbury
I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking.
Albert Einstein
You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.
Henri Matisse
The best magic quotes and sayings.
3. Funny creativity quotes
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann
You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood. What mood is that? Last-minute panic.
Bill Watterson
Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.
Salvador Dali
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.
Kurt Vonnegut
For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Just think how many books I could’ve sold if Harry had been a bit more creative with his wand.
J.K. Rowling, on the success of 50 Shades of Grey
Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
C.E.M. Joad
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
Witty sayings
The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.
G.K. Chesterton
You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.
Lewis Carroll
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
Salvador Dali
That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.
Ray Bradbury
Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has had an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it who makes a difference.
Nolan Bushnell
Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.
H.P. Lovecraft
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
4. Short creativity quotes
Creativity takes courage.
Henri Matisse
Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.
T.S. Eliot
You don’t make art out of good intentions.
Gustave Flaubert
I shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul Gauguin
The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.
Mikhail Bakunin
The comfort zone is the great enemy to creativity.
Dan Stevens
You become more divine as you become more creative.
Osho
Anxiety is part of creativity, the need to get something out.
David Duchovny
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Erich Fromm
The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.
Pablo Picasso
A creative mess is better than idle tidiness.
Michael J. Fox
Everything we see in the world is the creative work of women.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
5. Creativity quotes about life
Creativity makes life more fun and more interesting.
Edward de Bono
Your greatest creation is your creative life. It’s all in your hands.
Sara Zarr
The good life is ever changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative and risky.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.
Dr. Seuss
An adult life is a slowly emerging design, with shifting components, occasional dramatic disruptions, and fresh creative arrangements.
Jill Ker Conway
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
More creativity life quotes
Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
Vladimir Nabokov
A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.
Will Self
There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.
Edward de Bono
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
Steve Jobs
The creative person is willing to live with ambiguity. He doesn’t need problems solved immediately and can afford to wait for the right ideas.
Abe Tannenbaum
About love
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 Gustav Jung
The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.
Austin Kleon
Passion
The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.
Auguste Rodin
I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.
Albert Einstein
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. Creativity and mental health quotes
All the things that truly matter, beauty, love, creativity, joy and inner peace arise from beyond the mind.
Eckhart Tolle
Happiness sayings
The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.
Robert Henri
Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.
Red Haircrow
Wellbeing
There are many aspects to success; material wealth is only one component. But success also includes good health, energy and enthusiasm for life, fulfilling relationships, creative freedom, emotional and psychological stability, a sense of well-being, and peace of mind.
Deepak Chopra
Spiritual
Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.
Henry Miller
Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
E. E. Cummings
No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.
Ansel Adams
Because you’re a creation of God, you reflect the Divine qualities of creativity, wisdom, and love.
Doreen Virtue
7. Creativity quotes about art
Creative genius
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.
Mary Shelly
The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.
Ernest Becker
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Creative people are often found either disagreeable or intimidating by mediocrities.
Criss Jami
Creative juices
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
Creative soul
Creativity requires a state of grace. So many things are required for it to succeed.
Magda Szabó
What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul.
Deepak Chopra
The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.
Elizabeth Gilbert
The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.
Kurt Vonnegut
Originality
Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.
Nikola Tesla
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.
Henry Thomas Buckle
Originality is the best form of rebellion.
Mike Sasso
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
John Maynard Keynes
I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
Marcel Duchamp
The only unique contribution that we will ever make in this world will be born of our creativity.
Brené Brown
Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
Beatrix Potter
Imagination
Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.
Albert Einstein
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
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
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein
Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.
Colin Wilson
The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination.
Albert Einstein
Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.
Carl Gustav Jung
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
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
Albert Einstein
Skills
The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.
Robert Greene
Vision
We adore chaos because we love to produce order.
M. C. Escher
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
Steve Jobs
Creativity is seeing something that doesn’t exist already. You need to find out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God.
Michele Shea
8. Creativity quotes for creatives
For artists, designers, and photographers
To be an artist is to believe in life.
Henry Moore
Good art inspires; Good design motivates.
Otl Aicher
If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much.
Steve Jobs
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
Robert Hughes
To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.
Akira Kurosawa
If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.
Steven Pressfield
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
Leo Tolstoy
Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it ‘creative observation.’ Creative viewing.
William S. Burroughs
For writers and poets
Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
Stephen King
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.
Truman Capote
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
The writer’s curse is that even in solitude, no matter its duration, he never grows lonely or bored.
Criss Jami
There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
Graham Greene
Put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
Colette
A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.
Criss Jami
9. Creativity quotes for learning and education
Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
Brenda Ueland
Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
Kurt Vonnegut
There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life.
Sophia Loren
For teachers
Creativity is contagious, pass it on.
Albert Einstein (attributed but not confirmed)
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
Albert Einstein
A society’s competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.
Albert Einstein
For students
Learning gives creativity
Creativity leads to thinking
Thinking provides knowledge
Knowledge makes you great.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
The most creative act you will ever undertake is the act of creating yourself.
Deepak Chopra
When I say be creative I don’t mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem.
Osho
Reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer’s breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer — perhaps more.
Jasper Fforde
I think that you’ve got to make something that pleases you and hope that other people feel the same way.
Thomas Keller
For kids
When we treat children’s play as seriously as it deserves, we are helping them feel the joy that’s to be found in the creative spirit. It’s the things we play with and the people who help us play that make a great difference in our lives.
Fred Rogers
The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.
Sigmund Freud
Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Arthur Koestler
Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.
Leo Burnett
10. Creativity quotes for work, business, and entrepreneurs
Hard work
The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.
Steven Pressfield
Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.
Dee Hock
Creativity in the workplace
The way to ratchet up our species is to get better things to more people – products with spirit and creativity.
Steve Jobs
If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
John Cleese
Steve Jobs quotes on creative leadership success
- Stay hungry, stay foolish.
- You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
- It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
Advertising and marketing
If it doesn’t sell; it isn’t creative.
David Ogilvy
[Advertising] 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
11. Famous creativity quotes
If you can dream it, you can do it.
Walt Disney
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
There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.
Marie Antoinette
When you can do a common thing in an uncommon way; you will command the attention of the world.
George Washington Carver
Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur
Albert Einstein creativity quotes
- If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
- We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
- You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.
- Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
- A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
By famous artists
The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.
Leonardo da Vinci
Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.
Pablo Picasso
Don’t think about making art, just get it done.
Andy Warhol
You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.
Salvador Dalí
If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
Pablo Picasso
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.
Marc Chagall
Great things are not done by impulse, but a series of small things brought together.
Vincent van Gogh
You have to do stuff that average people don’t understand because those are the only good things.
Andy Warhol
Everything you can imagine is real.
Pablo Picasso
By famous authors
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man.
John Steinbeck
The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Sylvia Plath
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
Jack Kerouac
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
Maya Angelou
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
John Updike
True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.
Arthur Rimbaud
The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.
Pearl S. Buck
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
John Steinbeck
By famous musicians
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
There’s room for everybody on the planet to be creative and conscious if you are your own person. If you’re trying to be like somebody else, then there isn’t.
Tori Amos
12. Quotes and captions for Instagram
- Think differently.
- Creativity: Intelligence having fun.
- King of creativity.
- Creativity is contagious.
- My superpower is creativity.
- Free your mind. Follow your creativity.
- A great storm of creativity.
- Creativity never goes out of style.
- Why be normal?
- Coffee and creativity.
- Let’s make stuff.
- Creativity runs through my veins.
- Just living my dream.
- Creativity takes courage.
- Unleash your creativity.
- Creative for life.
- Be creative.
- Creativity matters.
- The creative adult is the child who survived.
- Creativity is a way of life!
- Think outside the box.
- Stay weird.
- Enjoy creativity.
- Creativity is 10% inspiration and 90% caffeination.
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