Quotations for Creativity
Quotation Categories
"Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the
pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish." --Ovid
"Did you ever observe to whom the accidents happen? Chance favors
only the prepared mind." --Louis Pasteur
Change
"Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself
and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life."
--Herbert Otto
Creation
"Creation is only the projection into form of that which already exists." --Shrimad Bhagavatam
Creative Ability
"We have to regard it as our sacred responsibilitiy to unfold and develop each individual's creative ability as dim as the spark may be and kindle it to whatever flame it may conceivably develop."--Victor Lowenfeld
Creative Act/Process
"An act that produces effective surprise --this I shall take as
the hallmark of creative enterprise....Effective surprises...have the quality
of obviousness about them when they occur, producing a shock of recognition
following which there is no longer astonishment." --Jerome Bruner
"I write because in the act of creation there comes that mysterious, abundant sense of being both parent and child; I am giving birth to an Other and simultaneously being reborn as a child in the playground of creation. --Francine du Plessix Gray
"Every creative act involves...a new innocence of perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief." --Arthur Koestler
"...a first rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting."
--Abraham Maslow
Creativity
"We're entering the creative age. Everybody has creativity. If
I were to teach young people I would find in each of them their potential.
Creativity is after all the thing that makes us like God." --Francis
Ford Coppola
"Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know." --George Kneller
"Creativity is harnessing universality and making it flow through your eyes." --Peter Koestenbaum
"The question is, who is interested in creativity? Any my answer
is that practically everybody is. This interest is no longer confined to
psychologists and psychiatrists. Now it has become a question of national
and international policy as well." --Abraham Maslow
"The problem of creativity is beset with mysticism, confused definitions, value judgments, psychoanalytic admonitions, and the crushing weight of philosophical speculation dating from ancient times." --Albert Rothenberg
Discovery
"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight
of the shore for a very long time." --Andre Gide
"A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind."
--Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
"A well-known physicist in Britain once told Wolfgang Kohler, 'We
often talk about the three B's, the Bus, the Bath, and the Bed. That is
where the great discoveries are made in our science.'" --Julian
Jaynes
"Just as an explorer penetrates into new and unknown lands, one
makes discoveries in the everyday life, and the erstwhile mute surroundings
begin to speak a language which becomes increasingly clear."--Wassily
Kandinsky
"A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover."--Alfred North Whitehead
Genius
"What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work,
is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already
been said is still not enough." --Euegene Delacroix
"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts;
they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." --Ralph
Waldo Emerson
"Every creative genius has been a channel for the divine power
of the universe." --Shakti Gawain
Imagination
"You have only to work up imagination to the state of vision and
the thing is done." --William Blake
"The primary imagination I hold to be the Living Power." --Samuel
Taylor Coleridge
"The faculty of imagination is both the rudder and the bridle of
the senses." --Leonardo da Vinci
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." --Albert
Einstein
"Your imagination is your preview of life's coming attractions."
--Albert Einstein
"No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element
of imagination." --Edward Hopper
"Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever fyet
come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable."
--C. G. Jung
"Imagination rules the world." --Napoleon I
"The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination
is boundless." --Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"My imagination has been overstimulated all my life by life itself."
--Isaac Bashevis Singer
"You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out
of focus." --Mark Twain
"So you see, imagination needs moodling--long, inefficient, happy
idling, dawdling and puttering." --Brenda Ueland
Intuition
"A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something." --Frank
Capra
"During periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual activity,
the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce the sudden clarifying
insights which give so much joy and delight." --Fritjof Capra
"The only real valuable thing is intuition." --Albert Einstein
"I call intuition cosmic fishing. You feel the nibble, and then
you have to hook the fish." --Buckminster Fuller
"To whatever degree you listen to and follow your intuition, you
will become a creative channel for the higher power of the universe to
the same degree." -- Shakti Gawain
"Learning to trust our intuition is an art form, and like all other
art forms, it takes practice to perfect."--Shakti Gawain
"The intuitive is most accurately understood as a speeded-up, subconscious
logic, parallel to conscious thought, in all save its greater delicacy
and fluidity." --Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
"To the rationally minded the mental processes of the intuitive
appear to work backward." --Frances Wickes
Invention
"In order to invent, one must think aside." --Etienne Souriau
Play
"What we play is life." --Louis Armstrong
"Play is the exultation of the possible." --Martin Buber
"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect
but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind
plays with the objects it loves." --C. G. Jung
"Life must be lived as play." --Plato
Problems/Problem Solving
"In my opinion, the optimal situation in problem-solving is to
be able to use a clean-minded approach to a problem, even though your mind
is stuffed with information." --James L. Adams
"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't
see the problem." --G. K. Chesterson
"The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its
solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental
skill." --Albert Einstein and L. Infeld
Questions
"Writing, which is my form of celebration and prayer, is also my
form of inquiry." --Diane Ackerman
"The real object of education is to have a man in the condition
of continually asking questions." --Bishop Creighton
"always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question."
--e.e. cummings
"To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old questions
from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances
in science." -- Albert Einstein and L. Infeld
"What unites us--the ultimate grounhd of our claim to equality--is
our common ignorance of the central questions posed for us by the universe."
--Paul Freund
"I cannot expect even my own art to provide all of the answers--only
to hope it keeps asking the right questions." --Grace Hartigan
"Questions are the creative acts of intelligence." --Frank
Kingdon
"Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart
And try to love the questions themselves." --Rainer Maria Rilke
"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." --Jalal ud-Din
Rumi
"The function of thinking is not just solving an actual problem
but discovering, envisaging, going into deeper questions. Often in great
discoveries the most important thing is that a certain question is found.
Envisaging, putting the productive question is often a more important,
often a greater achievement than solution of a set question." --M.
Wertheimer
Unconscious/Subconscious/Conscious
"Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of
subconsciousness--I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of
self-consciousness." --Aaron Copland
"The unconscious, though one cannot force it, will not produce
new ideas unless it has been painstakingly stuffed full of facts, impressions,
concepts, and an endless series of conscious ruminations and attempted
solutions." --Morton Hunt
"...to the unconscious belongs not only the complicated task of
constructing the bulk of various combination of ideas, but also the most
delicate and essential one of selecting those which satisfy our sense of
beauty and, consequently, are likely to be useful." --Henri Poincare
"The mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this arises from within...and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or of its departure." --Percy Bysshe Shelley
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