Creative Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Perhaps the best thing we can do for the creative person is to stay out of his way.

As in a studio of creative Death
The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan
The drama of the earth, their tragic stage.
All who would raise the fallen world must come
Under the dangerous arches of their power;
For even the radiant children of the gods
To darken their privilege is and dreadful right.
None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell. This too the traveller of the worlds must dare.

If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.

Given the freedom to create, everybody is creative. All of us have an innate, instinctive desire to change our environment, to put our original stamp on this world, to tell a story never told before.

William Shatner

Everyone has huge creative capacities. The challenge is to develop them. A culture of creativity has to involve everybody, not just a select few.

I feel sorry for kids these days. They get so much homework. Remember the days when we put a belt around our two books and carried them home? Now they're dragging a suitcase. They have school all day, then homework from six until eleven. There's no time left to be creative. The hardest part for me is when my thirteen-year-old is complaining about the workload. I agree with him. I'm supposed to be responsible and support the teacher. But it's like, "You're right, son. This is bullshit."

You are right. Countless uses of Bose instruments will be made by future generations. The scientist seldom knows contemporaneous reward; it is enough to possess the joy of creative service.

Jagadish Chandra Bose

I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism—real life—the now.

Berenice Abbott

Being creative without talent is a bit like being a perfectionist and not being able to do anything right.

Skill in any performance whether it be in sports in playing the piano in conversation or in selling merchandise consists not in painfully and consciously thinking out each action as it is performed but in relaxing and letting the job do itself through you. Creative performance is spontaneous and 'natural' as opposed to self-conscious and studied.

Intellectually religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.

Globalisation is highly selective. It proceeds by linking up all that, according to dominant interests, has value anywhere in the planet, and discarding anything which has no value or becomes devalued, in a variable geometry of creative destruction and destructive creation of value.

Manuel Castells

While the hero journeys for external fame, fortune, and power, the heroine tries to regain her lost creative spirit… Once she hears the cries of this lost part of herself needing rescue, her journey truly begins.

Valerie Estelle Frankel

The nearest we approach God…is as creative beings. The poet, by echoing the primary imagination, recreates. Through his work he forces those who read him to do the same, thus bringing them... nearer to the actual being of God as displayed in action.

Even as a kid, I felt isolated. Isolation makes you sensitive. As a kid, I felt I was the only person who was like that. But there's a good side to isolation. It makes you sensitive, and sensitivity is part of the creative process.

I was interested in achieving a creative freedom, a style that I could express with Seurat's.... color technique [color-divisionism], but shaped to my own needs. Proof that I found it is in my paintings of that period, among which is the famous 'Pan-Pan a Monico' [Severini painted in 1912]. My preference for Neo-Impressionism dates from those works. At times I tried to suppress it, but it always worked its way back to the surface.

Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.

Ludwig von Mises

Common sense dictates that we evaluate our beliefs on the basis of how they affect us. If they make us more loving, creative, and wise, they are good beliefs. If they make us cruel, jealous, depressed and sick, they cannot be good beliefs.

Barbara Marx Hubbard

There is but one God. True is His Name, creative His personality and immortal His form. He is without fear sans enmity, unborn and self-illumined. By the Guru's grace He is obtained.

We should not have a tin cup out for something as important as the arts in the country, the richest in the world. Creative artists are always begging, but always being used when it's time to show us at our best.

Pliny declares, as I hear, that he does not believe in the gods, but he believes in dreams; and perhaps he is right. My jests do not prevent me from thinking at times that in truth there is only one deity, eternal, creative, all-powerful, Venus Genetrix. She brings souls together; she unites bodies and things. Eros called the world out of chaos. Whether he did well is another question; but, since he did so, we should recognize his might, though we are free not to bless it.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

What is creative instinct, if not an incessant living sympathy with Nature, a constant craving like that of Nature's own, to fashion something new out of all that comes within the grasp of those faculties with which Nature has endowed us? The qualities of vision, of fancy, and of imaginative power, are no more divorced from Nature, than are the qualities of common-sense and courage. They are rarer, that is all.

John Galsworthy

It's that creative spark that I'm so jealous of for our agency and that I'm so desperately fearful of losing. I don't want scientists. I don't want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.

Without chaos there would be no creation, no structure and no existence. After all, order is merely the repetition of patterns; chaos is the process that establishes those patterns. Without this creative self-organizing force, the universe would be devoid of biological life, the birth of stars and galaxies—everything we have come to know.

There is little place in the political scheme of things for an independent, creative personality, for a fighter. Anyone who takes that role must pay a price.

Shirley Chisholm