Skip to content

Creativity Quotes

Welcome to the creativity quotes section of the website. On this page, I list interesting quotes that I find during my research on the topic of creativity.

creativity quotes

“The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a fad” 
– President of the Michigan Savings bank (When advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in the Ford motor company) 

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” 
-Scott Adams 

“What is genius – but the power of expressing a new individuality?” 

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

“A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.” 
-Jacques Maritain 

“Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys.” 
– Sam Walton 

“Man is an imagining being.” 
– Gaston Bachelard 

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” 
– Charles Mingus 

“There’s no good idea that cannot be improved on.” 
– Michael Eisner 

“One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive one.” 
– Ralph Waldo Emerson 

“Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.” 
– Charles Baudelaire 

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct arising from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves.” 
– Carl Jung 

“We have approximately 60,000 thoughts in a day. Unfortunately, 95% of them are thoughts we had the day before.” 
– Deepak Chopra 

“If you can dream it, you can do it.” 
– Walt Disney 

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” 
– John Steinbeck 

“Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.” 
– Emile Chartier 

“Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.” 
– Jonathan Swift 

More creativity quotes…

“After years of telling corporate citizens to ‘trust the system,’ many companies must relearn instead to trust their people – and encourage their people to use neglected creative capacities in order to tap the most potent economic stimulus of all: idea power.” 
– Rosabeth Moss Kanter 

“You have a coyote inside you and you have to get it out” 
– Chuck Jones (The animator who created Wile E. Coyote, on how to draw one) 

“People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” 
– Daryl F Zanuck (Head of 20th Century Fox commenting on television in 1946) 

“In a real sense, ideas are the lifeblood of organizations and represent their only sustainable competitive advantage. The only way to avoid Why didn’t I think of that? is to think of it first. Creativity is the most critical of all human resources. Without it there would be little progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.” 
– Creativity Consultant Ted Coulson 

“Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.” 
– Alan Alda 

“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.” 
– Mary Lou Cook 

“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will have truly defeated age.” 
– Sophia Loren 

“To be creative, an idea must also be appropriate – useful and actionable. It must somehow influence the way business gets done by improving a product, for instance, or by opening up a new way to approach a process.”
– Teresa M Amabile – Professor Harvard Business School

This creativity quote from psychologist and author R.Keith Sawyer reminds us that creativity isn’t all about luck or those aha moments…

“Take risks, and expect to make lots of mistakes, because creativity is a numbers game. Work hard, and take frequent breaks, but stay with it over time. Do what you love, because creative breakthroughs take years of hard work. Develop a network of colleagues, and schedule time for freewheeling, unstructured discussions. Most of all, forget those romantic myths that creativity is all about being artsy and gifted and not about hard work. They discourage us because we’re waiting for that one full-blown moment of inspiration. And while we’re waiting, we may never start working on what we might someday create.”
– R.Keith Sawyer – Psychologist and Author


Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when you only have one idea.

– Emile-Auguste Chartier – French philosopher, journalist, and pacifist


Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

– Dr. Howard Thurman (1899 – April 10, 1981)


“Creativity is a step on from imagination. 

You see you could be imaginative all day long and never do anything. 

You know you could be lying in bed being wonderfully imaginative but if nothing happened, nobody would think you were being creative. 

You would never say of somebody, 

“They’re very creative.” 

“Oh really, what do they do?” 

“Nothing. Nothing at all.” To be creative, you have to do something. 

Creativity is a very practical process. 

Creativity is putting your imagination to work. I think of it as applied imagination.”

– Sir Ken Robinson – Author, Speaker


Creativity Quotes From Barbara Januszkiewicz

“Being open to new ideas, new opportunities and new challenges will keep you young and thinking like an artist. As we grow up, slowly we play less with our imagination and dreams. We expect the youth to be more adventuress and as we mature we take fewer risks. As my goal today is to play, just play…and play some more.” 

“Jazz vision is a wordless conversation between musical notes and visual expressions.”

“Liebman’s sound offers me visual expressions in an ever-changing musical palette.”

“Jazz is the art of thinking out loud.”

“Jazz can be a blank canvas full of possibilities.”

“Imagination needs to be fed.”

“Creative thinking inspires ideas. Ideas inspire change.”

“Jazz vision is the fusion of music and art a real paradox of same-yet different. Here we play in exchanges, like the hardness of the key of c# major and from the softness of Db major—- capturing, reflecting and improvising. Jazz vision for me is seeing my art in musical terms.”

“Art matters.”

“Behind every vision, there is an inspiration.”

“There is creative vision in each of us, but sometimes it’s hard to get that creative part started.”

“There are no mistakes in art, only opportunities to be more creative.”

“Seek your creative vision. Be drawn to the arts for it can expand your imagination.”

“Today, change my life.”

“Ideas come to us, not from us.”

“Open your mind. Open your heart, and be a composer that can improvise a harmonic friendship in harmonic colors.”

“Creativity is magic” If you don’t try something new, you are standing still as an artist.”

“Creativity is not being afraid to be different. It takes madness to jump at an idea that no one else believes in.” 

“Midnight torsion, my creative hour. I sometimes become lost in my own labyrinth maze of misdirections.”

“My work grows as a result of experimentation with approaches, materials, and techniques.”. “In this spirit of experimentation, I have found I enjoy the moments of expressing myself with color, lines, shapes. I find true freedom in placing paint on paper.”

“Il y a inspiration, innovation et puis il y a ce qui est possible.”


Creativity Quotes from Charles Kettering

“If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.” 

“99 percent of success is built on failure.” 

“A problem well stated is a problem half solved.” 

“Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.” 


Creativity Quotes from Thomas Alva Edison

“The greatest invention in the world is the mind of a child.” 

“I failed my way to success.” 


Creativity Quotes From Albert Einstein

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” 

“The important thing is not to stop questioning” 

”The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” 

”The legs are the wheels of creativity.” 

Creativity Quotes from Henry Ford

“If you think you can, or if you think you can’t, you are right” 

“One who fears failure limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again.” 

“I am looking for a lot of people who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.”

More Quotes About Creativity

Ideal for those of you out there that might be stuck in a little bit of a creative rut.
 
Get your creative juices flowing again by reading through the quotes listed below, hopefully one or two of them will inspire you back into creative action!
 
“You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” – Lee Iacocca
 
“Swipe from the best, then adapt.” – Tom Peters
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.” – Shunryu Suzuki
 
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep” – Scott Adams
 
“If you go to your grave without painting your masterpiece, it will not get painted. No one else can paint it.” – Gordon MacKenzie
 
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” – Goethe
 
“The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.” – Mikhail Bakunin
 
“Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem” – Brian Aldiss
 
“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” – John Cage
 
“If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.” – Alfred Noble
 
“No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered.” – Winston Churchill
 
“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.” – Linus Pauling
 
“Confusion is a word we have invented for an order that is not yet understood.” – Henry Miller
 
“The way to succeed is to double your failure rate.” – Thomas Watson, (Founder of IBM)
 
“I’ve been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.” – Steven Wright
 
”Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.” – Edward De Bono
 
”Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.” – Robert Bresson
 
”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
 
”It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.” – Julius Caesar
 
”A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.” – Frank Capra
 
”Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.” – Mary Lou Cook
 
”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
 
”Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” – Erich Fromm
 
”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
 
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Alan Kay
 
“Every act of creation is, first of all, an act of destruction.” – Pablo Picasso
 
“The man with a new idea is a crank – until the idea succeeds.” – Mark Twain
 
“Money never starts an idea; it is the idea that starts the money.” – William J. Cameron
 

Quotes About Creativity From Napoleon Hill

 
“All achievement, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea!”
 
“Ideas are the beginning points for all fortunes. Ideas are products of the imagination.” 
 
 
 

Please note that as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Martin Gilliard is a participant in the Amazon EU Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.co.uk ** TEST **

You may also be interested in my other website leadership-and-development.com covering topics on leadership and personal development.