Creative Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.

Vladimir Nabokov

For those who seek to understand it, death is a highly creative force. The highest spiritual values of life can originate from the thought and study of death.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.

On this matter of criticism, something that appalls me is the idea going around now that the practice of criticism is opposed to the literary impulse—is necessarily opposed to it. Sure, it may be a trap, it may destroy the creative impulse, but so may drink or money or respectability. But criticism is a perfectly natural human activity, and somehow the dullest, most technical criticism may be associated with full creativity.

Robert Penn Warren

David Hare said that the two most depressing words in the English language are literary fiction. I couldn't agree more. But we might soon have to add that the two most depressing words in the American language are creative nonfiction.

Building your "dream life" is filled with things that can feel like the opposite of a dream:
Mistakes
Delays
Starting over
Failure

The building part is actually more of a rebuilding that is a continual process. The building is not linear in nature but far more interesting. You might start a creative dream, take the "next step", and find yourself completely bored, dissatisfied, or just not inspired.

All creative work has its greatest reality while it is still in a man's mind, before he begins to execute it.

Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.

Love of self and love of life connects us with the prosperity of the Universe. Self-love creates self-expression and allows us to be creative in deeply fulfilling ways.

In the wake of the housing debacle in California, more people are buying less expensive homes, making bigger down payments, and staying away from 'creative' and risky financing. It is amazing how fast people learn when they are not insulated from the consequences of their decisions.

The scientific childintraining should foreshadowthe scientific man in creative work.

Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin

There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.

This is an incredibly creative time. It is a difficult time. It is a disparaging time. A time of cultural and global transitions based on the realization that the Earth cannot support nonsustainable practices anymore.

Terry Tempest Williams

All that the senses can but imperfectly comprehend, all that is most awful in such romantic scenes of nature, may become a source of enjoyment to man, by opening a wide field to the creative powers of his imagination.

Alexander von Humboldt

Every human being has creative powers. You were born to create. Appreciate your inborn potential.

To tap into that natural creative spirit, recapture your childlike enthusiasm for everything around you. Work with the reckless delight of a child.

As long as we avoid the creative, we are condemned to reaction.

Paula Gunn Allen

Communication is the essential medium of a creative culture: the communal sea in which we all swim. A company that can't communicate is like a jazz band without instruments: Music just isn't going to happen.

As your training progresses, always remember that the key to gaining the ability for spontaneous and creative technique lies in good ukemi;

Mitsugi Saotome

Being receptive, being able to listen openly and well, is a crucial skill for creative problem-solving.

Paul A. Kaufman

In order not to cut out a large part of one's private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.

Christian theology provides some of the best arguments for respecting animal life and for taking seriously animals as partners with us within God's creation. It may be ironical that this tradition, once thought of as the bastion of human moral exclusivity, should now be seen as the seed-bed for a creative understanding of animal liberation.

Being creative is at the heart of being human and of all cultural progress.

The degree of talent, the size of the gift, is immaterial. All artists must listen, but not all hear great symphonies, see wide canvasses, conceive complex, character-filled novels. No
matter, the creative act is the same, and it is an act of faith.

Madeleine L'Engle

With every pill we have prescribed for us we should also be given a creative prayer, a suggested way to correct our destructive patterns of thought.