Quotes About Creativity

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

— Linus Pauling

The best ideas come from jokes.  Make your thinking as funny as possible.

— David Ogilvie

Young men are fitter to invent than to judge.

— Francis Bacon

Originality is not seen in single words or even sentences.  Originality is the sum total of a man’s thinking and writing.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Originality is the essence of true scholarship.  Creativity is the soul of the true scholar.

— Nnamdi Azikiwe

Ah, good taste!  What a dreadful thing!  Taste is the enemy of creativeness.

— Pablo Picasso

A foolish consistency is the hobglobin of little minds.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

When in doubt, make a fool of yourself.  There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth.  So what the hell, leap.

— Cynthia Heimel

Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training.

— Anna Freud

Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black, and the aesthete unoffended.

— Raymond Loewy

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life — the power to create.

— Vincent van Gogh

Art begins with resistance — at the point where resistance is overcome.  No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.

— Andre Gide

I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

The creative person is both primitive and more cultivated, more destructive and more constructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person.

— Dr. Frank Barron

Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club?  Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report?  Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals.  The divine spark leaps.

— A. Whitney Griswold

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work.  The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

— Rev. Phillips Brooks

In creating, the only hard thing’s to begin; a grass blade’s no easier to make than an oak.

— James Russell Lowell

Nothing can be created out of nothing.

— Lucretius, first century b.c.

All good tings which exist are the fruits of originality.

— John Stuart Mill

We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Men are like trees: each one must put forth the leaf that is created in him.

— Henry Ward Beecher

He or she is greatest who contributes the greatest original practical example.

— Walt Whitman

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

— William Wordsworth

You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.

— Napoleon Bonaparte