Creative Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We commonly think of freedom as the ability to define alternatives and choose between them. The creative mind exceeds this liberty in being able to redefine itself and reality at large, generating whole new sets of alternatives.

If A is A, a philosopher should equal a philosopher. But that's not the way the cosmos works. Similar things set themselves apart from one another.... What's more, opposites are joined at the hip. Einstein says that most creative acts come from opposition. They come from pitting yourself against someone with another point of view. They come from the law of differentiation. And that was true of Aristotle and his law of identity, his law of noncontradiction, his construction for the base for A is A. Aristotle came up with his idea... to fling a finger in the face of another philosopher [Heraclitus]...

There is no doubt that the efficiency of the Works at Bournville is assisted by the Suggestion Scheme, and it has been found that the good accomplished, is not only in the pecuniary value to the Firm or to the suggestor, but also in the development of the mental and creative power, which makes both men and girls more efficient and valuable workers, and fosters an intelligent independence.

[Biology has] become the paramount science, exceeding other disciplines, including physics and chemistry at least, in the creative tumult of its disciplines and disputations. [...] I'll also be so bold at this point to suggest that we are now at the edge of establishing the two fundamental laws of biology: The first law is that all of the phenomena of biology, the entities and the processes, are ultimately obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry. Not immediately reducible to them, but ultimately consistent and in consilience with them, by a cause and effect explanation. The second law is that all biological phenomena, these entities and processes that define life itself, have arisen by evolution through natural selection.

Instead of instilling fear, if a company offered a way for everyone in the business to dive within-to start expanding energy and intelligence-people would work overtime for free. They would be far more creative. And the company would just leap forward. This is the way it can be. It's not the way it is, but it could be that way so easily.

Poincaré's mind was not subject to hysteresis or hibernation. He had the unique faculty of dismissing an idea from his mind, the instant the stimulus was gone, and to supplant it immediately with another creative idea.

a demand which will never be fulfilled as long as artists use individualistic means. 'Unity can only result from disciplining the means, for it is this discipline which produces more generalized means'. The objectification of the means will lead towards elementary, monumental plastic expression. It would be ridiculous to maintain that none of this relates to creative activity. If that were true, art would not be subject to logical discipline.

Theo van Doesburg

Private imaginings may have no outcomes in the world at all. Creativity does. Being creative involves doing something.

All this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us the by senses and experience.

I find myself frequently maintaining to any young passer-by upon whose attention I can force myself that a genuinely creative career must like a milking stool stand on three legs. There must be accident, there must be sweat, there must be dissatisfaction. That one must work hard is too obvious for comment here. That one must be endowed with native dissatisfaction is very nearly as obvious, for it is the engine that drives you: dissatisfaction with the world and the arts as you find them, dissatisfaction with your own best efforts to capture the uncapturable. What is not so obvious is the support which one must gain from accident, from those dispositions of wind and stars over which one has no control.

Until the early nineties, I was under the impression that the Celts were this mad collection of anarchists from Ireland, Scotland and Wales. When I saw an exhibition in Venice, I discovered they were a vast collection of tribes originating from Middle and Eastern Europe as far back as 500 BC, and that over the centuries they migrated and integrated with people all over the world. So I've used this cultural history as a creative muse. With The Book Of Secrets in particular, I was interested in beginning with their earlier and more Eastern history

Loreena McKennitt

Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.

Eric S. Raymond

Perspiration is the best form of differentiation, especially in the creative world.

We can never really change other people... all we can change is ourselves. This process takes a lot of grace and strength that we don't have apart from God. But in his compassionate, creative hands, our wounds and sins can become the source of our deepest growth.

I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term — meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching — there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

The creative strength is good enough and deep enough to bring itself to flower and to grow in spite of this sickness.

Joanne Greenberg

One of the best safeguards of our hopes, I have suggested, is to be able to mark off the areas of hopelessness and to acknowledge them, to face them directly, not with despair but with the creative intent of keeping them from polluting all the areas of possibility.

William F. Lynch

Loving, like prayer, is a power as a well as a process. It is curative. It is creative.

Worthy work carries with it the hope of pleasure in rest, the hope of the pleasure in our using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill.
All other work but this is worthless; it is slaves' work — mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil.

Those Fear and Loathing drawings were only possible for me because of the America's Cup six months earlier, which injected the the drawings with the eerie sense of being there to record the sensations. It was a regurgitation, a psycho-artistic vomit - a creative, cathartic cleansing of my inner being.

The function of the artist is to disturb. His duty is to arouse the sleeper, to shake the complacent pillars of the world.In a world terrified of change, he preaches revolution-the principle of life. He is an agitator, a disturber of the peace-quick, impatient, positive, restless and disquieting. He is the creative spirit of life working in the the soul of man.

What is important is for each individual to order her life so that she becomes a happy, creative person.

Millicent Carey McIntosh

The gap between vision and current reality is also a source of energy. If there were no gap, there would be no need for any action to move towards the vision. We call this gap creative tension.

Anybody in the creative business, as you might call it, has some sense of guilt about fooling around with fact, that you're committing larceny, that all of life is material for your fabulations.

Malicious gossip, which takes the place of creation in non-creative lives, of course draws heavily on imagination.