Creative Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others.

Mikhail Bakhtin

Creative scientists and saints expect revelation and do not fear it. Neither do children. But as we grow up and we are hurt, we learned not to trust.

Madeleine L'Engle

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."

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

Listen, there were creative writing teachers long before there were creative writing courses, and they were called and continue to be called editors.

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

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

I said in Slapstick that she [his sister] was the person I wrote for — that every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. That's the secret of artistic unity.

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.

The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.

Émile Durkheim

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

Missions then is less about the transportation of God from one place to another and more about the identification of a God who is already there [...] You see God where others don't. And then you point him out. So the issue isn't so much taking Jesus to people who don't have him, but going to a place and pointing out to the people the creative, life-giving God who is already present in their midst.

What do I really want to do, and what will help me continue to be creative, and what will lead me towards being the artist that I want to be in the end.

What about the creative state? In it a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences, and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.

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

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.

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

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.

I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.

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

Photography is not an art. Neither is painting, nor sculpture, literature or music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings... You do not have to be a painter or a sculptor to be an artist. You may be a shoemaker. You may be creative as such. And, if so, you are a greater artist than the majority of the painters whose work is shown in the art galleries of today.

Alfred Stieglitz