An aphorism is nothing else but the slightest
QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON CREATIVITY
The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.
Edward Albee (1928-, American playwright, dramatist)
Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.
Brian Aldiss (1925-, British science fiction writer)
Had I been present at the creation of the world I would have proposed some improvements.
Alfonso X (1221-1284, Spanish King of Leon and Castile)
The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth-century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six months, or six years down the road. But he has faith that it will happen.
Carl Ally (1924-, American advertising expert, co-founder of Ally & Gargano)
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented, except literally to get out of hell.
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948, French theater producer, actor, theorist)
The lash may force men to physical labor, it cannot force them to spiritual creativity.
Sholem Asch (1880-1957, Polish-born American writer)
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work "comes" to him.
W. H. Auden (1907-1973, Anglo-American poet)
Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.
Arnold Bennett (1867-1931, British novelist)
I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.
William Blake (1757-1827, British poet, painter)
Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.
Edward De Bono (1933-, British writer on thinking process)
Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.
Robert Bresson (1907-1999, French film director)
The good ideas are all hammered out in agony by individuals, not spewed out by groups.
Charles Browder
The human mind cannot create anything. It produces nothing until after having been fertilized by experience and meditation; its acquisitions are the gems of its production.
Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon (1707-1788, French naturalist)
There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself, he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.
Norman Douglas (1868-1952, British author)
It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.
Julius Caesar (101-44 BC, Roman emperor)
A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.
Frank Capra (1897-1991, Italian film director)
Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.
Mary Lou Cook
It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.
Mary Daly (1928-, American feminist and theological writer)
First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
Robert Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972, Irish poet)
The whole difference between construction and creation is this; that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870, British novelist)
Creativity is essentially a lonely art, an even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing; to others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.
Lou Dorfsman
All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives its final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968, French artist)
The legs are the wheels of creativity.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, German-born American physicist)
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, German-born American physicist)
That which builds is better than that which is built.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882, American poet, essayist)
I have asked a lot of my emotions -- one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something, not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940, American writer) Author's website: www.fitzgeraldsociety.org
Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.
Anna Freud
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Erich Fromm (1900-1980, American psychologist)
Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
Erich Fromm (1900-1980, American psychologist)
We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset (1883-1955, Spanish essayist, philosopher)
We try not to have ideas, preferring accidents. To create, you must empty yourself of every artistic thought.
Gilbert George (1943-, Italian-born British artist)
Because of their courage, their lack of fear, they (creative people) are willing to make silly mistakes. The truly creative person is one who can think crazy; such a person knows full well that many of his great ideas will prove to be worthless. The creative person is flexible; he is able to change as the situation changes, to break habits, to face indecision and changes in conditions without undue stress. He is not threatened by the unexpected as rigid, inflexible people are.
Frank Goble
A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832, German poet, dramatist, novelist)
The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832, German poet, dramatist, novelist)
To create something you must be something.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832, German poet, dramatist, novelist)
From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?
Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961, American writer)
It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm.
Mary Henle
It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities and talents.
Eric Hoffer (1902-1983, American author, philosopher)
Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?
Karen Horney (1885-1952, American psychiatrist)
Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity.
Jean Houston
Creativity comes from awakening and directing men's higher natures, which originate in the primal depths of the universe and are appointed by Heaven.
I Ching (12th century BC, Chinese book of changes)
Genius is initiative on fire.
George Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948, British essayist, literary historian,)
A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations.
Gerald G. Jampolsky (1925-, American psychiatrist, lecturer, author)
Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.
Carl Jung (1875-1961, Swiss psychiatrist)
The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Carl Jung (1875-1961, Swiss psychiatrist)
Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.
Carl Jung (1875-1961, Swiss psychiatrist)
The power in which we must have faith if we would be well, is the creative and curative power which exists in every living thing.
John Kellogg
Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty -- as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.
Florence E. King (1936-, American author, critic)
Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.
Paul Klee (1879-1940, Swiss artist)
Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.
George Kneller
Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Arthur Koestler (1905-1983, Hungarian born British writer)
True creativity often starts where language ends.
Arthur Koestler (1905-1983, Hungarian born British writer)
Creativity is a highfalutin' word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.
Ray Kroc (1902-1984, American businessman, founder of McDonalds)
Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.
Edwin H. Land (1909-1991, American scientist, founder of Polaroid Camera & Co.)
The essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail.
Edwin H. Land (1909-1991, American scientist, founder of Polaroid Camera & Co.)
There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.
Henry Miller (1891-1980, American author)
Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.
George Lois
It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965, British novelist, playwright)
The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
Agnes De Mille (1905-1993, American dancer, choreographer, writer)
Creation is a drug I can't do without.
Cecil B. De Mille (1881-1959, American film producer and director)
All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself -- civilization, in a word is the fruits of the creative artist. It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape.
Henry Miller (1891-1980, American author)
All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself -- civilization, in a word is the fruits of the creative artist. It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape.
Henry Miller (1891-1980, American author)
The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything -- and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the "productive" man a yet higher species.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, German philosopher)
Out of nothing can come, and nothing can become nothing.
Persius (34-62, Satirical poet)
I do not seek. I find.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973, Spanish artist)
The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973, Spanish artist)
Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy -- the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.
Norman Podhoretz
I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.
Marcel Proust (1871-1922, French novelist)
Even the best writer has to erase sometimes.
Spanish Proverb (Sayings of Spanish origin)
An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.
Man Ray (1890-1976, American photographer)
Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926, German poet)
Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.
Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978, American art critic, author)
When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation.
Margaret Sackville (1881-1963, British poet)
One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967, American poet)
The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the "creative" is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the non-mystic, a war to the death.
May Sarton (1912-1995, American poet, novelist)
It is wise to learn; it is God-like to create.
John Saxe
Creative words generate energy; negative words drain out energy.
Robert H. Schuller (1926-, American minister, author, social leader)
The person who can combine frames of reference and draw connections between ostensibly unrelated points of view is likely to be the one who makes the creative breakthrough.
Denise Shekerjian
Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an after life.
Arianna Stassinopoulos (1950-, Greek author)
I do my best work when I am in pain and turmoil.
Sting (1951-, British-born American musician, singer, songwriter, actor)
Creative power is that receptive attitude of expectancy which makes a mold into which the plastic and as yet undifferentiated substance can flow and take the desired form.
Thomas Troward
He who is most creative conceals his sources the best.
Author Unknown
The creative person is usually rebellious. He or she is the survivor of a trauma called education.
Author Unknown
The creative process involves getting input, making a recommendation, getting critical review, getting more input, improving the recommendation, getting more critical review... again and again and again.
Author Unknown
Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
Paul Valery (1871-1945, French poet, essayist)
A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstinting has been naught.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939, Irish poet, playwright.)
The things we fear most in organizations -- fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances -- are the primary sources of creativity.
Margaret J. Wheatley
Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. The creative explorer looks for history in a hardware store and fashion in an airport.
Robert Wieder
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