76 Creativity Quotes

In a world that constantly demands innovation and fresh ideas, creativity has become a prized possession. Whether you're an artist, entrepreneur, or simply someone who enjoys thinking outside the box, a spark of creativity can make all the difference. To inspire your imaginative journey, we've curated a collection of the top 76 creativity quotes. These words of wisdom come from a diverse group of thinkers, artists, and innovators, each offering unique insights into the creative process. Dive in and let these quotes ignite your passion and fuel your next big idea.

1. “The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work.” - Ray Kurzweil

2. “life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one” - Stella Adler

3. “For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

4. “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

5. “The inner fire is the most important thing mankind possesses.” - Edith Södergran

6. “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.” - Marcel Duchamp

7. “Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.” - John Barth

8. “Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.” - Clarissa Pinkola Estés

9. “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

10. “The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.” - Saul Steinberg

11. “Anymore, no one's mind is their own.” - Chuck Palahniuk

12. “If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing” - Glenn Gould

13. “Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values--that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others--that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human--that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay--that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live--that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road--that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up--that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.” - Ayn Rand

14. “You cannot reconcile creativeness with technical achievement. You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter...having lost the song, we pursue the singer. We learn from the singer the technique of song, but there is no song; and I say the song is essential, the joy of singing is essential. When the joy is there, the technique can be built up from nothing; you will invent your own technique, you won't have to study elocution or style. When you have, you see, and the very seeing of beauty is an art.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti

15. “You love your work. God help you, you love it! And thats the curse. That's the brand on your forehead for all of them to see. You love it and they know it, and they know they have you. Do you ever look at the people in the street? Aren't you afraid of them? I am. They move past you and they wear hats and they carry bundles. But that's not the substance of them. The substance of them is hatred for any man who loves his work. That's the only kind they fear. I don't know why” - Ayn Rand

16. “You don’t make art out of good intentions.” - Gustave Flaubert

17. “Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.” - Charles Baudelaire

18. “(the modern writer’s aim is) general revelation by suggestion (and) making a very tiny part do for a whole.” - Sean O'Faolain

19. “Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, lessens the friction of social contacts. It is only in lies, wholeheartedly and bravely told, that human nature attains through words and speech the forbearance, the nobility, the romance, the idealism, that -- being what it is -- it falls so short of in fact and in deed.” - Clare Boothe Luce

20. “Every one who has taken a shower has had an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it that makes a difference.” - Nolan Bushnell

21. “She soon learned, though, that giving weight to other people's opinions was creative nihilism; it was like being banished from the Land of No Words and exiled to the Land of All Bullshit.” - Stephanie Kallos

22. “I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.” - Gustave Flaubert

23. “(The subjects of What Should I Do With The Rest Of My Life) "have convinced me that past failing can as easily prove preparatory as predictive. Age does not of itself limit on enable us. The choice is ours.” - Bruce Frankel

24. “Fashion is a language that creates itself in clothes to interpret reality.” - Karl Lagerfeld

25. “SOWING LIGHTNINGSeizeBolts of lightning from the skyAnd plant them in fields of life.They will grow like tender sprouts of fire.Charge somber thoughtsWith unexpected flash,You, my lightning in the soil!” - Visar Zhiti

26. “Humor and paradox are often the only ways to respond to life's sorrow with grace.” - Matthew Fox

27. “Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience.” - Masaru Ibuka

28. “There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.” - G.K. Chesterton

29. “Creativity is not so much a boundless well, but an all-you-can-eat buffet of elements for your creative endeavor.Eventually you've eaten your fill, and it's time to digest and then make something.But at some point, it will be time to return to the restaurant.” - Vera Nazarian

30. “I have learned that what I have not drawn I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.” - Frederick Frank

31. “Building your "dream life" is filled with things that can feel like the opposite of a dream:MistakesDelaysStarting overFailureThe building part is actually more of a rebuilding that is a continual process. The building is not linear in nature but far more interesting. You might start a creative dream, take the "next step", and find yourself completely bored, dissatisfied, or just not inspired. ” - Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (SARK)

32. “Initially, I feel expansive when I try something new, and then contract as soon as I encounter difficulty or the unknown. I am learning to experiment with my tolerance of difficulty and the not knowing, in order to go further with my creative dreams.Whenever I experience contraction, I explore it by asking, "Where did I stop and why?" Building a creative dream life is not just about achieving, succeeding, or "meeting goals." It is also about floundering, stumbling, tripping and failing. ” - Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (SARK)

33. “All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.” - Jimi Hendrix

34. “Creativity is as important as literacy” - Ken Robinson

35. “Find your authentic voice, become vulnerable, and then put yourself out there.” - Meredith Brooks

36. “She's thinking that what she's been doing all these years isn't what she wants to do anymore. Sometimes music flows to her and from her, but sometimes it doesn't. Lately that happens more and more, and she can't seem to find what she had and what made her special. But she can't tell her father because he'd be so disappointed in her, so disappointed to find out she's not extraordinary after all.” - Leila Cobo

37. “Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.” - Thomas Mann

38. “Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.” - Max Ernst

39. “All that remains of the garden city in our own day are traffic-free enclaves, islands in a sea of traffic where the pedestrian leads a legally protected by languishing existence, comparable to that of the North American Indians on their reservations...In reality the modern urbanist regards the city as a gigantic centre of production, geared to the efficient transport of workers and goods, to the accommodation of people and the storage of wares, to industrial and commercial activity. The rest, that is to say creativity, life, is optional and comes under the heading of recreation and leisure activities.” - Tom McDonough

40. “I’ve decided the act that cannot wait / is the important will to create / But, ah, if my belly is ignored / the pantry door I shall implore / But I’ve been known to reach the bed / ideas still famished in my head.” - Roman Payne

41. “When I am ..... completely myself, entirely alone... or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these ideas come I know not nor can I force them.” - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

42. “Originality is the best form of rebellion.” - Mike Sasso

43. “Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.” - Brenda Ueland

44. “When you have wit of your own, it's a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.” - Criss Jami

45. “I had fallen into a profound dream-like reverie in which I heard him speaking as at a distance. 'And yet there is no one who communes with only one god,' he was saying, 'and the more a man lives in imagination and in a refined understanding, the more gods does he meet with and talk with, and the more does he come under the power of Roland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles the last trumpet of the body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw them perishing away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for them up and down the world and could not find them; and under the power of all those countless divinities who have taken upon themselves spiritual bodies in the minds of the modern poets and romance writers, and under the power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance have won everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds and fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense. The many think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips.” - W.B. Yeats

46. “Indeed, very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the first phalange, the mesophalange, and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain. The fact is that the other organ which we call the brain, the one with which we came into the world, the one which we transport around in our head and which transports us so that we can transport it, has only ever had very general, vague, diffuse and, above all, unimaginative ideas about what the hands and fingers should do. For example, if the brain-in-our-head suddenly gets an idea for a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music or literature, or a clay figurine, it simply sends a signal to that effect and then waits to see what will happen” - José Saramago

47. “De entre los sonidos, palabras y otros elementos triviales, podemos construir juguetes líricos e intelectuales, originar filosofías y canciones llenas de mensajes y consuelo más bellas que el ruin deporte de la fortuna y el destino.” - Hermann Hesse

48. “Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to imagine possibilities and then turn those possibilities into realities. Evident in the gifts of civilization—in our arts, languages, sciences, technologies, businesses, governments, and so on—it is clear that we are a profoundly creative species. Yet many of us only access a smidgen of our creativity.” - Scott Edmund Miller

49. “And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!” - David Almond

50. “No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.” - Julia Cameron

51. “The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.” - Anthony Jay

52. “As Aristotle said, 'Excellence is a habit.' I would say furthermore that excellence is made constant through the feeling that comes right after one has completed a work which he himself finds undeniably awe-inspiring. He only wants to relax until he's ready to renew such a feeling all over again because to him, all else has become absolutely trivial.” - Criss Jami

53. “Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good...The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.” - Donald Miller

54. “Authors always carry a means for scribbling and an excuse for pausing, often inopportunely, to record those fleeting sparks of creative fancy that might otherwise vanish like a wisp in the wind if ignored.  Writing is a jealous and needy lover.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

55. “Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.” - Kurt Vonnegut

56. “The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin.” - Cornell Woolrich

57. “The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker... The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God.” - George MacDonald

58. “It is the artist who tries to gradually accustom people to the possibilities of a better state of things.” - C.A. Dawson Scott

59. “And so we keep on thinking, because the next thought might be the answer.” - Jonah Lehrer

60. “When learning is purposeful, creativity blossoms. When creativity blossoms, thinking emanates. When thinking emanates, knowledge is fully lit. When knowledge is lit, economy flourishes.” - APJ ABDUL KALAM

61. “Speed is not always a constituent to great work, the process of creation should be given time and thought.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

62. “One is either an artist or one is not. It is not something one becomes. It is something that one is from birth. We do not study to be artists. We study to become more proficient. To understand more.” - Edward Swift

63. “When I think of normality I think of mediocrity” - Gillian Anderson

64. “A writer's mind can never be empty.” - Michael Acciarino

65. “At least I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it.” - Brenda Ueland

66. “Creativity and ideas fired between every synapse underneath my skin and I felt radiant from the inside out.” - Belinda Jeffrey

67. “The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.” - Vilayat Inayat Khan

68. “You and I are stymied in our own creativity. We can only create as sub-creators, and even then our best work is only sub-creation.” - Matt Chandler

69. “Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new film, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul.” - Jim Jarmusch

70. “Be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else--that's how you'll get ahead.” - Austin Kleon

71. “P.S. It's not schizophrenia, it's creativity, there is a difference. My voices go away after I let them tell their stories.” - Ashley Newell

72. “I could write about how I feel when I sing, write and create something from heartbreak, sorrow, sadness or just simply nothingness. How nothingness can become the most beautiful, unexplainable feeling that makes you forget about gravity for an hour.” - Charlotte Eriksson

73. “If we weren’t already doing it this way, is this the way we would start?” - Paul Depodesta

74. “When you're making something, you're in a different state. You go into a deep level of concentration, to the point where you're not self-conscious anymore, it's just flowing out of you.” - David Rakoff

75. “Successful continual learning means maintaining a balance and variety of success-oriented attributes, the most prominent being awareness, confidence, persistence, determination, courage, and focus. But curiosity, ingenuity, and creativity may be even more important as it is these traits that fuel the desire to continue to question and challenge the status quo.” - Lorii Myers

76. “Within you is the power of unlimited creation.” - Bryant McGill