Think Outside-the-Box With These 75 Creativity Quotes To Inspire Your Imagination
Express yourself and embrace creative outlets with these inspiring quotes.
How many times have you ventured to create something only to hit a wall? You may have had tons of great ideas yesterday but today you are hearing crickets. All of those good thoughts are forgotten in all the chaos of life. When times like these happen, we may just need a little encouragement to get ourselves back on track. Hearing what creative people have to say about creative thinking can give us just the little push we need to let our imaginations flow and that's where good creativity quotes can become lifesavers.
Sometimes, you may start out working on a creative project but then self-doubt comes rearing its ugly head. As Sylvia Plath has said, "The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." We need to let our minds go free to be creative. If you are having a difficult time expressing yourself, we have the perfect collection of quotes on creativity to help you out.
Here are 75 of the best creativity quotes, we have found from famous creators, to give you renewed inspiration.
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Best Creativity Quotes
1. "Creativity is seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought.” — Albert Einstein
2. “Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the things you can think up if only you try!” — Dr. Seuss
3. “Every child is an artist, the problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” — Pablo Picasso
4. “Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.” — Dorothy Parker
5. “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” — Sylvia Plath
6. “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
7. “If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.” — Ken Robinson
8. “You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” — Maya Angelou
9. “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” — Scott Adams
10. “Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.” — Brenda Ueland
11. “Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” — Erich Fromm
12. “Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity” — T.S. Eliot
13, “Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.” — Austin Kleon
14. “A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.” — Criss Jami
15. “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
16. “It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.” — Chuck Palahniuk
17. “I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.”— Madonna
18. “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” — Joseph Chilton Pearce
19. “Creativity is an act of defiance.”— Twyla Tharp
20. “Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.” — Red Haircrow
21. “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
22. “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
23. “The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.” — G.K. Chesterton
24. “What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul.” — Deepak Chopra
25. “Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.” — Richard Buckminster Fuller
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Creative Quotes To Contemplate
26. “You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.” — Lewis Carroll
27. “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan
28. “Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.” — Beatrix Potter
29. “Non-judgment quiets the internal dialogue, and this opens once again the doorway to creativity.” — Deepak Chopra
30. “I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.” — Criss Jami
31. “Creativity is intelligence having fun.” — Albert Einstein
32. “Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.” — Arthur Koestler
33. “Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.” — Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
34. “The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” — Robert Henri
35. “Clear thinking at the wrong moment can stifle creativity.” — Karl Lagerfeld
36. “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
37. “You don’t make art out of good intentions.” — Gustave Flaubert
38. “It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.” — Lois McMaster Bujold
39. “I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.” — J.K. Rowling
40. “We nurture our creativity when we release our inner child. Let it run and roam free. It will take you on a brighter journey.” — Serina Hartwell
41. “Creativity doesn’t wait for that perfect moment. It fashions its own perfect moments out of ordinary ones.” — Bruce Garrabrandt
42. “An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.” — Edwin Land
43. “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”— Saul Bellow
44. “I dwell in possibility.” — Emily Dickinson
45. “A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.” — Henry Ford
46. “There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.” — Mark Twain
47. “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” — John Maynard Keynes
48. “If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
49. “Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.” — Brendan Francis Brown
50. “Create. Not for the money. Not for the fame. Not for the recognition. But for the pure joy of creating something and sharing it.” — Ernest Barbaric
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Inspiring Creative Quotes
51. “I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.” — Leonard Bernstein
52. “All good work requires self-revelation.” — Sidney Lumet
53. “The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain.” — Nikola Tesla
54. “Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.” — Virginia Woolf
55. “If your business plan depends on suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.” — Hugh MacLeod
56. “My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life.” — Miles Davis
57. “Get out of your mind and become crazy about your future in a creative way!” — Michael Bassey Johnson
58. “A picture might be worth a thousand words but a good sentence is worth a thousand windows.” — Mati Klarwein
59. “There are some people who live in a dream world, and some who face reality and then there are those who turn one into the other.” — Douglas Everett
60. “The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.” — Saul Steinberg
61. “What if the very reason you were created was to be creative?” — Michelle Dennis Evans
62. “As the story grew, it put down roots into the past and threw out unexpected branches .” — J.R.R. Tolkien
63. “Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while working.” — Henri Matisse
64. “If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.” — Twyla Tharp
65. “They're only crayons. You didn't fear them in Kindergarten, why fear them now?” — Hugh MacLeod
66. “When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience is a most excellent teacher.” — Frederic Chopin
67. “Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.” — Jacob Bronowski
68. “Find your authentic voice, become vulnerable, and then put yourself out there.” — Meredith Brooks
69. “Arrogance kills creativity.” — A.M. Riley
70. “Creativity is the brain's invisible muscle -- that when used and exercised routinely -- becomes better and stronger.” — Ashley Ormon
71. “The creative strength is good enough and deep enough to bring itself to flower and to grow in spite of this sickness.” — Joanne Greenberg
72. “I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.” — Arthur Holitscher
73. “You have to be willing to spend time making things for no known reason.” — Lynda Barry
74. “We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.” — Dave Eggers
75. “A culture of unaccountability is a culture without incentive, and a culture without incentive is the death of critical and creative thinking.” — Michael R. LeGault