Creativity quotes

“Don’t give up on books. They feel so good – their friendly heft. The sweet reluctance of their pages when you turn them with your sensitive fingertips. A large part of our brains is devoted to deciding whether what our hands are touching is good or bad for us. Any brain worth a nickel knows books are good for us.” Kurt Vonnegut

“Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly.” Hugh McCleod

“I don’t think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman, or child.” Joseph Campbell

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. ” Ray Bradbury

“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” Robert Henri

“Creativity is an act of defiance.” Twyla Tharp

“The only requirements for attending our workshops are curiosity and a desire to explore the creative spirit inherent to us all.” The Creativity Workshop

“When you look in the mirror you see not just your face but a museum. Although your face, in one sense, is your own, it is composed of a collage of features you have inherited from your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. The lips and eyes that either bother or please you are not yours alone but are also features of your ancestors, long dead perhaps as individuals but still very much alive as fragments in you. Even complex qualities such as your sense of balance, musical abilities, shyness in crowds, or susceptibility to sickness have been lived before. We carry the past around with us all the time, and not just in our bodies. It lives also in our customs, including the way we speak. The past is a set of invisible lenses we wear constantly, and through these we perceive the world and the world perceives us. We stand always on the shoulders of our ancestors, whether or not we look down to acknowledge them.” Excerpt From: David W. Anthony. “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.”

“We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers – thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.” Peter S. Beagle, The Tolkien Reader

“Don’t try to control your creativity. Surrender to it.” The Creativity Workshop

“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“We evaluate ourselves when we feel bad, we just experience ourselves when we feel good… because the very act of evaluating reduces our experience, it might be better not to ask. Instead we might just let ourselves be.” Ellen J. Langer

“Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.” Bill Moyers

“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” Carl Sagan, ‘Cosmos’

“In reality each reader reads only what is within himself. The book is no more than a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found out but for the aid of the book.” Marcel Proust

“Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.” Brendan Francis Brown

“A painting is not thought out and settled in advance. While it is being , it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it’s finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it.” Pablo Picasso

“Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.” Beatrix Potter

“Every story has already been told. Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.” Anna Quindlen [Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999].

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Ironically say I, the feeling of egolessness is the journey home and the experience of the mindful self.” Virginia Woolf

“To make a living at being a professional artist is for someone else to explore. My interest is in our taking as a means of getting closer to who we can be, the matter of becoming authentic. It’s really about the journey home.” Ellen Langer, On Becoming an Artist

“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” Kurt Vonnegut

“Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.” Charlie Parker

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Maya Angelou

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.” Martha Graham

“Every time I walk on grass, I feel sorry because I know the grass is screaming at me.” Barbara McClintock
Quoted in Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (1984.

“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

“Creativity takes courage.” Henri Matisse

“From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardor and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigor.” Julia Margaret Cameron

“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.” John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.” Henry David Thoreau

“Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak… surrender to them. Don’t ask first whether it’s permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that.” Hermann Hesse

“Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.” Salvador Dali

“It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we’re alive – to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.” Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” Kurt Vonnegut

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.” Pearl S. Buck

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” Albert Einstein

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” Winston S. Churchill

“Defensiveness halts growth… it occurs as a result of an evaluative stance. Evaluation is language based rather than experience based; the very process of evaluating removes the person from the interaction, that is, from the experience… defending the self by making downward social comparisons removes the self from the interaction that could provide the opportunity for further growth. The “experiencing self” and the “self-evaluating self” are mutually exclusive, and self actualizing is the antithesis of self protection.” Ellen J. Langer On Becoming an Artist

“The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible.” William S. Burroughs

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.” Mary Shelley

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

“This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor: ART is the great unifying and humanizing experience. The life of the arts, far from being an interruption or a distraction in the life of a nation is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose.” John F Kennedy

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Thomas A. Edison

“We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.” John Dyson Freeman, Infinite in All Directions

“I turned my coal-house into my dark room, and a glazed fowl house I had given to my children became my glass house! The hens were liberated, I hope and believe not eaten… all hands and hearts sympathized in my new labour, since the society of hens and chickens was soon changed for that of poets, prophets, painters and lovely maidens, who all in turn have immortalized the humble little farm erection.” Julia Margaret Cameron (1874)

“Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must”, then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. Don’t write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes a great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty Describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sound – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. And if out of, this turning within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.” Rainer Maria Rilke

“The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command…. I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, “Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.” And the artist either says, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary. As for Mary, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child’s creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss.” Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Arts

“When focusing and coming to something which, to my eye, was very beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus which all other photographers insist upon…” Julia Margaret Cameron (1874)

“We try not to have ideas, preferring accidents.” Gilbert George

“From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out.” Rilke

“If you know you’re right, you don’t care. You know that sooner or later, it will come out in the wash.” When asked about the long delay in recognition for her discovery. Barbara McClintock

“Too much of the time, we are not seeing, hearing, tasting, or experiencing what would turn lives troubled by boredom and loneliness into lives that are rich and exciting. We unwittingly give up our potential for creative endeavor and consequently live sealed in unlived lives….” Ellen Langer

“Anything anyone does every day is important and imposing and anywhere someone lives is interesting and beautiful.” Gertrude Stein

“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill

“God is really another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.” Pablo Picasso

“Technique is what you fall back on when you run out of inspiration.” Rudolf Nureyev

“Too much analysis inhibits creativity.” Peter Weir

“If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.” John Cleese

“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then — and only then — it is handed to you”. Annie Dillard

“If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.” Woody Allen

“The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it”. Dee Hock

“Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.” Erica Jong

“Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.” Martha Graham

“There is creative reading as well as creative writing”. Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” Carl Jung

“The distance between those who and those who do not is not as great as it feels to those who want to but are afraid to. The actions that critics attach to artists and their work more often than not lead many of us to feel more intimidated. Ironically, they increase the gap that lies between us and the artist, when their role is presumed to bring us closer to the artist and her work.” Ellen J. Langer, On Becoming an Artist

“The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.” Israel Zangwill

“I start with the seedling, and I don’t want to leave it. I don’t feel I really know the story if I don’t watch the plant all the way along. So I know every plant in the field. I know them intimately, and I find it a real pleasure to know them.” Barbara McClintock

“If you hear a voice within you say, ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” Vincent Van Gogh

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.” Annie Dillard

“The secret of life…is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.” Paulo Coelho, from The Alchemist

“To be a person is to have a story to tell.” Isak Dinesen

“The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.” Henry Moore

“You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.” Nietzsche

“We typically regard creative pursuits as “leisure” activities, and that word suggests they are unimportant. They may well, however, hold the key to the problem of finding meaning and fulfillment in the rest of our lives. Because we take them to be for our “leisure,” they need not carry the threat to our self-esteem that other aspects of our life do.” Ellen Langer, A Life of Mindful Creativity

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.”
W. Somerset Maugham

“Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.” Arthur Koestler

“We are all failures – at least the best of us are.” J.M. Barrie

“I was just so interested in what I was doing I could hardly wait to get up in the morning and get at it. One of my friends, a geneticist, said I was a child, because only children can’t wait to get up in the morning to get at what they want to do.” Barbara McClintock

“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” Carl Jung

“Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.” Anna Freud

“Contrary to what we usually believe, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we
make happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” Michelangelo

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” Albert Szent-Györgyi

“Fear collides with our most conservative self and allows us to stop before we try, dismiss before we think, mock before we imagine.” Carol Lloyd

“We can do more than dream, we can imagine.” Aristotle

“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”
Virginia Woolf

“There is no cure for curiosity.” Dorothy Parker

“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.”
Charles Dickens

“In every real man a child is hidden who wants to play.” Friedrich Nietzsche

“It never occurred to me that there was going to be any stumbling block. Not that I had the answer, but [I had] the joy of going at it. When you have that joy, you do the right experiments. You let the material tell you where to go, and it tells you at every step what the next has to be because you’re integrating with an overall brand new pattern in mind.
When asked how she could have worked for two years without knowing the outcome.” Barbara McClintock, Quoted in Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (1984), 125

“Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.” Ned Rorem

“Perhaps we don’t have to be beginners to have beginner’s luck. We just need to let ourselves be in the present, and when we do, we tap into our authentic self–our natural, mindfully creative self.” Ellen Langer

“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” Maya Angelou

“Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.” Arthur Koestler

“I feel I change my mind all the time. And I sort of feel that’s your responsibility as a person, as a human being – to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don’t contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you’re not thinking.” Malcolm Gladwell

“What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.” Alain de Botton

“Living creatively means being yourself, not just complying with the wishes of other people.” Matt Groening

“Go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” Kurt Vonnegut

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” George Bernard Shaw

“The greatest happiness is when the eye discovers beauty where neither the mind conceived of nor the hand intended any.” Orhan Pamuk

Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, after spending a lifetime searching for the ultimate meaning of life, concluded that he had little more to say than, “Try to be a little kinder.” Author Henry James concluded the same: “Three things are important in life. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” Plato

“The word ‘amateur’–from the Latin ‘amator’ or lover–means to create for the sheer love of it. It is only recently that the word ‘amateur’ became a dirty one. Until the 1980′s, just about every educated person no matter what his or her profession played an instrument, or painted, or wrote for pleasure. The aim of these hobbies wasn’t necessarily to become the next Beethoven but to deepen the sensibilities of the individual doing them.” Shelley Berc, excerpt from ‘The Gift of the Amateur’

“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Here is a strange thing — almost like a secret. You start out putting words down and there are three things — you, the pen, and the page. Then gradually the three things merge until they are all one and you feel about the page as you do about your arm.” John Steinbeck, journal of the writing of Grapes of Wrath

“The only things in my life that compatibly exists with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit.” Ansel Adams

“When I was in the middle of writing Eat Pray Love and I fell into one of those pits of despair that we will fall into when we’re working on something that’s not coming and we think ‘this is going to be a disaster, this is going to be the worst book I’ve ever written — not just that but the worst book ever written … So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room and I said aloud ‘ Listen you, thing! You and I both know that if this book isn’t brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? Because you can see I am putting everything I have into this, I don’t have any more than this, so if you want it to be better then you’ve got to show up and do your part of the deal, OK? But you know what? If you don’t do that then I’m going to keep writing because that’s my job and I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up and did my part of the job!” Elizabeth Gilbert

“The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.” Agnes de Mille

Creativity: “the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, pattern, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, or imagination.”
Dictionary.com

“Dare to be RIDICULOUS.” Alejandro Fogel, Director, The Creativity Workshop

“Love what you do and do what you love. Don’t listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.” Ray Bradbury

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

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.” Neil Gaiman

“I can always be distracted by love, but eventually I get horny for my creativity.” Gilda Radner

“What gets projects for me is not inspiration. I have no idea what inspiration really is. I know that I get really curious about things, and when that gets mixed with rigor, a project gets completed. And that’s basically it, it’s that simple. When curiosity and rigor get together, something happens. And when one of these things [isn’t] there, nothing happens, or the project doesn’t really reach people.” Andrew Zuckerman, photographer

“Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.” Arthur Koestler

“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, Women Who Run With The Wolves: Contacting The Power Of The Wild Woman

“The whole life lies in the verb seeing.” Teilhard De Chardin

“It has always been my ambition not to remain the same, not to repeat the next day what I had made the day before, to constantly be inspired by something new, to register a new note.” Edouard Manet

“Begin with another’s to end with your own.” Baltasar Gracian

“You may not be a Picasso or Mozart but you don’t have to be. Just create to create. Create to remind yourself you’re still alive. Make stuff to inspire others to make something too. Create to learn a bit more about yourself.” Frederick Terrell

“It’s not what you are that holds you back, it’s what you think you’re not.” Unknown

“The creating comes first and the analyzing later. That leaves the creator in a place of uncertainty, an exhilarating position for a creator, but a situation our inner critic can’t stand—a good reason for her to stay out of our way at this point in the creative process. Creativity thrives on uncertainty. If we always knew the outcome of our creative endeavors we would probably be too bored to complete them.” Shelley Berc, Director, The Creativity Workshop

“When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.” Tuli Kupferberg

“…fear is the mortal enemy of innovation and happiness. If you’re afraid of mediocrity, you have to push past wherever mediocrity lives. A lot of people believe that there is a right and there is a wrong, and that there are creative rules. I think that trying to figure out what’s the right or wrong way to do things is a form of fear. This inhibits people, and holds them back. In creative departments, you need to create a culture where you can break lots of rules.” Alex Bogusky

“Thinking out of the box makes boxes obsolete.” The Creativity Workshop

“Creativity shouldn’t be seen as something otherworldly. It shouldn’t be thought of as a process reserved for artists and inventors and other ‘creative types.’ The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential programming code. At any given moment, the brain is automatically forming new associations, continually connecting an everyday x to an unexpected y.” Joshua Lehrer

“The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, which belongs also to the child, and as such it appears to be inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth.” Carl Jung

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.” Margaret Mead

“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” Anais Nin

“If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you’ll abort it if you do. Be patient and you’ll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.” Robert Heinlein

“When a work has been created by someone of status we typically take the time to engage it. But it is our degree of engagement, not the identity of the artist, that controls our enjoyment of the experience.” Ellen Langer

“Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives … most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity… [and] when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Professor of Pschology, Chicago University

“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface.” Virginia Woolf

“You think that because you understand ONE you understand TWO, because one and one makes two. But you must understand AND.” Sufi proverb

“I remembered a story of how Bach was approached by a young admirer one day and asked, “But Papa Bach, how do you manage to think of all these new tunes?” “My dear fellow,” Bach is said to have answered, according to my version, “I have no need to think of them. I have the greatest difficulty not to step on them when I get out of bed in the morning and start moving around my room.” Laurens Van der Post

“I shut my eyes in order to see”. Paul Gauguin

“Plants are extraordinary. For instance … if you pinch a leaf of a plant you set off electrical impulse. You can’t touch a plant without setting off an electrical impulse … There is no question that plants have all kinds of sensitivities. They do a lot of responding to an environment. They can do almost anything you can think of.” Barbara McClintock

“The future is not someplace we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths to it are not to be found but made.” John Schaar

“Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Lewis Carroll

“I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” Pablo Picasso

”You don’t need new glasses. Let your eyes see your inner space.” The Creativity Workshop

“I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.” Emily Bronte

“Creativity is not just about making, it is about receiving. It is about walking through the day receiving images and seeing through the blur, seeing with your whole body. Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and dreaming”. Alejandro Fogel, Director, The Creativity Workshop

“Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.” Louisa May Alcott

“Don’t worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test… Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap – but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.” Guy Kawasaki

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” Henry David Thoreau

“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.” Pablo Picasso

“What did you see today? Write it, draw it, create from it.” The Creativity Workshop

“Really we create nothing. We merely plagiarize nature.” Jean Baitaillon

“Thinking out of the box makes boxes obsolete.” The Creativity Workshop

“When you can see what everybody else has seen but be thinking what nobody else has thought, you will have discovered your creativity.” Unknown


“You will ask me where my ideas come from. I cannot say for certain. They come uncalled, sometimes independently, sometimes in association with other things. It seems to me that I could wrest them from Nature herself with my own hands, as I go walking in the woods. They come to me in the silence of the night or in the early morning, stirred into being by moods which the poet would translate into words, but which I put into sounds; and these go through my head ringing and singing and storming until at last I have them before me as notes.” Ludwig Van Beethoven

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited.” Plutarco

“If you have yet to be called an incorrigible, defiant woman,
don’t worry, there is still time.” Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“Don’t wear your seat belt, your imagination is active.” The Creativity Workshop

“The Balinese do not have a word for art. A word is not necessary when everything is appreciated in the way we tend to value only the work by master artists. The Balinese say they do everything, as well as they can.” Preston McClanahan

“Don’t go out without your notebook. You’d be surprised what you forget if you don’t record what you experience.” The Creativity Workshop

“Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.” Albert Einstein

“Start with a simple phrase, a simple image, a simple sound or action.” The Creativity Workshop

“The 5 Keys to Creative Success: Play – Process – Perceptivity – Patience – Persistence.” The Creativity Workshop

“Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind.” Hans Hofmann

“Don’t let your inner critic make you afraid to create. Toss it out the window and keep on dreaming.” The Creativity Workshop

“Do you see your creativity? Put up a white flag and let it take over.” The Creativity Workshop

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

“Creativity, after all, is a combinatorial force. It’s our ability to tap into the mental pool of resources — ideas, insights, knowledge, inspiration — that we’ve accumulated over the years just by being present and alive and awake to the world, and to combine them in extraordinary new ways. In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these ideas and build new ideas — like LEGOs. The more of these building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our creations will become.” Maria Popova

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” E.L. Doctorow

“Fail. Fail Again. Fail Better.” Samuel Beckett

“Get lost and explore the wilderness of your imagination.” The Creativity Workshop

“Everything in the universe has rhythm. Everything dances.” Maya Angelou

“Creativity thrives on uncertainty. If we always knew the outcome of our creative endeavors we would probably be too bored to complete them. Uncertainty, curiosity, stumbling one foot after the other we create our own unique yellow brick road of imagination. We find wonder and beauty everywhere when our senses are open.” Shelley Berc, Director, The Creativity Workshop

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing.” Gertrude Stein

“Creativity makes a leap, then looks to see where it is.” Mason Cooley

“I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and you laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.” Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.” Carl Jung

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” Mark Twain

“I am an artist… I am here to live out loud.” Emile Zola

“Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.” Lauren Bacall

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” Erich Fromm

“Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life… Therein he cannot be re¬placed, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.” Viktor Frankl

“I go forward…starting out with an image, even if I don’t know yet how to squeeze it, how to use it. It is trusting that picture that keeps me going.” Toni Morrison

“The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust

“Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.” Leo Burnett

“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.” Anne Sexton

“It is in our idleness, our dreams, that the submerged truth comes to the top.” Virginia Woolf

“A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” Lao Tse

“… having a lover and friends who look at you as a true living breathing entity, one that is human but made of very fine and moist and magical things as well… a lover and friends who support the ciatura in you… these are the people you are looking for. They will be the friends of your soul for life. Mindful choosing of friends and lovers, not to mention teachers, is critical to remaining conscious, remaining intuitive, remaining in charge of the fiery light that sees and knows.” Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

“The world is but a canvas to the imagination.” Henry David Thoreau

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off… They must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating.” Pearl Buck

“Open your eyes . . . wider.” The Creativity Workshop

“There is so much commonality between discoveries and breakthroughs in art and science. Scientists and artists are incredibly close in their moments of inspiration. To discover in either realm you have to forget everything you think you know and follow where the ideas and the images take you. The logistics in both cases are worked out later. You can’t have the ‘aha’ moment if you are continually thinking about if it will ‘work’ or not.” Shelley Berc, Director, The Creativity Workshop

“Each moment of our life, we either invoke or destroy our dreams.” Stuart Wilde

“To stay with our creative journey, we should celebrate our quirks, our idiosyncrasies, our unique and weird ways of perceiving and expressing. They are our staunchest defenders against the destructive aspects of self-judgment. They are the qualities that make our individual creativity unlike any other. They are, in fact, each creator’s home.” Shelley Berc, Director, The Creativity Workshop

“Dream when awake. Dream to awaken.” The Creativity Workshop

“Seek not outside you, heaven is within.” Mary Lou Cook

“Relax: your imagination is active.” The Creativity Workshop

“Watch kids play. Better yet, join them.” The Creativity Workshop

“It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.” Eric Hoffer

“The creative adult is the child who has survived.” Ursula K. Le Guin

“When was the first time in your life you thought about creating?” The Creativity Workshop

“You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story. You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.” Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott

“Without creativity we would be running in circles.” The Creativity Workshop

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” Antoine De Saint Exupery

“What attracted me was less art itself than the artist’s life and all that meant for me: the idea of creativity and freedom of expression and action. I had been attracted to painting and drawing for a long time, but it was not an irresistible passion; what I wanted, at all costs, was to escape the monotony of life.” Pierre Bonnard

“Clarity of painting comes from clarity of vision. A painter has to be emotionally right out there and present, both to perceive and to express.” Kate Palmer

“Sacred space is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.” Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one’s memory.” Edgar Degas

“An idea is salvation by imagination.” Frank Floyd Wright

“Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.” Anna Freud

“Every great advance…has issued from a new audacity of imagination.” John Dewey

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Pablo Picasso

“Discoveries are often made by not following instructions, by going off the main road, by trying the untried.” Frank Tyger

“The ability of a cell to sense these broken ends, to direct them towards each other, and then to unite them so that the union of the two DNA strands is correctly oriented, is a particularly revealing example of the sensitivity of cells to all that is going on within them. They make wise decisions and act on them.” Barbara McClintock, The Significance of Responses of the Genome to Challenge, Nobel Lecture

“The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” Carl Jung

“Write! Let your hand move faster than your brain.” The Creativity Workshop

“They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” Edgar Allan Poe

“Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t have the right to dream and to turn those dreams into living creations. The naysayers are just scared. Creativity means going down into the unknown, your unique unknown, and coming back up with treasures for all to share. Such a journey takes courage. Children have that courage, so can you. Besides, once you get on the imagination train it is a lot of fun. Ask yourself: what do I have to lose?” Shelley Berc, Director, The Creativity Workshop

“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” Anais Nin

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

“I have developed what I poorly define as intelligent stupidity: I remain ignorant and full of wonder about certain things. I think, perhaps erroneously, that this allows me to approach each role, each day, each task with the excitement and joy I remember as a child. Remember when you first fell into [Charles] Dickens? Or saw your first film or play? Your first opera or concert? I think we need to be stunned and grateful about these things. I think it keeps us capable of surprise and discovery. I bring my experience, but I also bring my wonder.” Alec Guinness

“I can believe anything provided it is incredible.” Oscar Wilde

“Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.” Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“Express your imagination and it will express your uniqueness.” The Creativity Workshop

“It’s not about breaking the rules. It is about abandoning the concept of rules altogether.” Paul Lemberg

“Artists are the bearers of the human being’s age-old capacity to be insurgent. They love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form…Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conversational, they always push on to newer worlds. Thus they are the creators of the “uncreated conscience of the race.” Rollo May, The Courage to Create

What Makes the Imagination Thrive:

. We are all born creative, curious, and imaginative. You can regain your inherent right to dream by training yourself to pay attention to your world in a new way.

. Concentrate on process not product.

. Listen to your environment.
Really listen.

. Remember: Some of the most inspired pieces start with insignificant ideas.

. Allow your ideas to grow without cutting them off or pronouncing them useless too soon.

. Make time for half an hour a day to write or draw without thinking about what you’re doing–let your hand outrun your mind,

. Share the process of your discoveries and creations. Being heard, being seen gives you the energy to keep creating when it gets tough.

. Put the critical side of your brain in a locked drawer until your intuition tells you where your creativity is going.

. Play! It’s the root of creativity.

. Carry a little notepad everywhere and scribble in it.

. Explore your memories. They are the map of your life.

by Shelley Berc and Alejandro Fogel, Directors, The Creativity Workshop

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” Marianne Williamson

“In the long history of humankind (and animalkind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” Charles Darwin

“With each new creative departure, one should leave with two pieces of luggage – the desire to have fun, and the desire to discover as much as possible along the way.” Unknown

“Give yourself permission to play and explore. No one else will.” The Creativity Workshop

“Inspiration is an awakening.” Giacomo Puccini

“A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations.” Gerald Jampolsky

“The creative mind plays with the object it loves.” Carl Jung

“A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely … but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude …” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.” Sherwood Anderson

“Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.” Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Imagine an animal with the attributes of a human and a human with the attributes of animal. Describe them.” The Creativity Workshop

“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.” Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.” Virginia Woolf

“Following one’s creative soul is like pursuing a butterfly—it is always floating in front of your noise, but so hard to catch. Maybe we should never even try catch it. Maybe we just need to keep following those wings.” Shelley Berc, Director, The Creativity Workshop

“Imagine all the colors that red can be.” The Creativity Workshop

“Imagination is a great and under-explored continent. Take time to map your inner landscape.” The Creativity Workshop

“It is usually when we are young that we learn to think we are not talented; we are told so by parents, teachers, and other adults. Inevitably, their evaluations are firmly tied to contexts–to particular schools of thought in particular periods of time… We don’t realize that the contexts in which we are being judged say little about our talent….
Given the disparity in aesthetic tastes, it is peculiar that a single art teacher can determine for us whether we have any artistic talent or not… Whole realms of experience are denied us because of (our belief) in such individual judgements.
When I look back, I wonder what mark I would have made on a piece of paper that would have led an adult to know that I couldn’t eventually paint like Pollack, Mondrian, Miro, or Matisse, given that almost any mark could recall an element of one of their styles.” Ellen J. Langer, On Becoming an Artist

“All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.” Carl Jung

“Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.” Rudyard Kipling.


”There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.
” Martha Graham

“The key question isn’t “What fosters creativity?” But it is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.” Abraham Maslow

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

“Tell your stories. No one else will hear them if you don’t.” The Creativity Workshop

“You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications.” Anais Nin

“Our imagination returns us to our true selves–half wizard, half pedestrian. It is our magic wand and our touchstone. Our imagination is a potent elixir that energizes spirit, mind, and body into profound transformation.” Shelley Berc, Director, The Creativity Workshop

“You may not be a Picasso or Mozart but you don’t have to be. Just create to create. Create to remind yourself you’re still alive. Make stuff to inspire others to make something too. Create to learn a bit more about yourself.” Frederick Terrell

“What to do when inspiration doesn’t come; be careful not to spook, get the wind up, force things into position.” John Huston

“With the tools and the knowledge, I could turn a developing snail’s egg into an elephant. It is not so much a matter of chemicals because snails and elephants do not differ that much; it is a matter of timing the action of genes.“ Barbara McClintock

“Imagine all the emotions that are orange and paint them.” The Creativity Workshop

“Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload
of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.” Dave Eggers

“What you can do, or dream you can, begin it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“If a tree is green, see what happens when you imagine it purple.” The Creativity Workshop

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” Henri Bergson

“We have to believe that a creative being lives within ourselves, whether we like it or not, and that we must get out of its way, for it will give us no peace until we do.” Mary Richards

“The soul should always stand ajar. Ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.” Emily Dickinson

“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” Albert Einstein

“We teach The Creativity Workshop in many locations worldwide, because travel and change of environment literally makes us see and think anew. We believe going out of one’s culture helps people find their own inner spark.” The Creativity Workshop

“It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for a while and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship one requires” Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

“Leave your unconscious alone. It will do all the work for you.”
The Creativity Workshop

“I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.” Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.” Madeleine L’Engle

“There’s only us, There’s only this, Forget regret, Or life is yours to miss” Mimi, Rent

“Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don’t waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success.” Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

“In the early stages of creation of both art and science, everything in the mind is a story” E. O. Wilson

“The light of the sun and moon cannot be outdistanced, yet mind reaches beyond them. Galaxies are as infinite as grains of sand, yet mind spreads outside them.” Eisai

“Every creative act involves… a new innocence of perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief.” Arthur Koestler

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” Friedrich Nietzsche

“I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.” Diane Ackerman

“Focus should be to encourage and develop creativity in all children without the ultimate goal being to make all children inventors, but rather to develop a future generation of critical thinkers.” Faraq Mousa

“The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him; on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life and on the other, a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire… there are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.” Carl Jung, The Spirit of Man in Art and Literature

“But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling, like dew, upon a thought produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions think.” 
Lord Byron

“From 30,000 feet, creating looks like art. From ground level, it’s a to-do list.” Ben Arment

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” Helen Keller

“I know my choices will be creative so long as I follow my heart.” Huey Lewis

“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only what you are expecting to give — which is everything. What you will receive in return varies. But it really has no connection with what you give. You give because you love and cannot help giving.” Katharine Hepburn

“I am a storyteller, for better and for worse.
I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.
The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place — irrespective of my subject — where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and that I have been writing all day.
Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun, as when I started it nearly seventy years ago.” Oliver Sacks, from his autobiography On the Move

“You will not find what you do not live.” Unknown

“What if the earth were the sky and the sky the earth?” The Creativity Workshop

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” Soren Kierkegaard

”We developed a unique series of exercises dedicated to inspiring and keeping alive the life of the imagination.” The Creativity Workshop

“When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” Steve Jobs

“Read, write, and improve: tell your stories. Accept rejection until you find acceptance, but don’t become disheartened, stop writing, and remove yourself from the conversation.”
Jesmyn Ward, author of ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’ National Book Award winner

“Just as appetite comes from eating, work brings inspiration.” Igor Stravinsky

“Thoughts give birth to a creative force that is neither elemental nor sidereal. Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow. When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven.” Philipus Paracelsus

“Creativity is a muscle: use it or lose it!” The Creativity Workshop

“It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date.” Roger von Oech

“More than in any other vocation, being an artist means always starting from nothing. Our work as artists is courageous and scary. There is no brief that comes along with it, no problem solving that’s given as a task… An artist’s work is almost entirely inquiry based and self-regulated. It is a fragile process of teaching oneself to work alone, and focusing on how to hone your quirky creative obsessions so that they eventually become so oddly specific that they can only be your own.” Teresita Fernández, Sculptor

“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The world that fiction comes from is fragile. It melts into
insignificance against the universe of what is clear and visible and known. It persists because it is based on the power of cadence and rhythm in language and these are mysterious and hard to defeat and keep in their place. The difference between fact and fiction is like the difference between land and water.” Colm Tobin

“You can’t work anymore. You dream
eyes open, hands open
In the wilderness
In the wilderness that plays
with the animals, the useless ones”
Paul Eluard

“A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things in a vision, a dream of the whole thing.” Charles Schwab

“The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.” Rollo May

“Writing through fear or even with fear present is part of the experience. There is however some amount of time that we can all outrun fear. Take advantage of those moments because little by little they add up and the patterns in the story start to take shape and the book begins to write itself.” Shelley Berc, Director, The Creativity Workshop

“Don’t be scared! The blank page isn’t blank anymore the moment you put something on it.” The Creativity Workshop

“Often I have such a great longing for myself. In my best dreams I see the day when I shall stand and greet myself… When the artist becomes ripe and strong, when he lives what now he dreams, the man will whither away and little by little die out. The artist is the eternity that juts into our days.” Rilke

“Be patient. Your imagination is at work all the time.” The Creativity Workshop

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” Albert Einstein

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.” Vincent Van Gogh

“The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might expect, by the ignorant mass- which is easily swayed once its imagination is caught- but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and in the monopoly of learning.” Arthur Koestler

“I don’t believe in this “gifted few” concept, just in people doing things they are really interested in doing.” Charles Eames

“The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.” Carl Jung

“Concern over criticism clogs creativity.” Duane Alan Hahn

“When all think alike, then no one is thinking.” Walter Lippman

“Creativity is the art of the impossible.” Ben Okri

“Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.” Gail Sheehy

“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.” Arthur Conan Doyle

“No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.” Ansel Adams

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” Sylvia Plath

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” Thomas Alva Edison

“An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.” Edwin Land

“The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.” George Lois

“Play is the highest form of research.” Albert Einstein

“Aspire to make your work creative, not perfect. The Creativity Workshop

“There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.” G.K. Chesterton

“I think productivity, as we define it, is flawed to begin with, because it equates a process with a product. So, our purpose is to produce — as opposed to, our purpose is to understand and have the byproduct of that understanding be the “product.” For me, I read, and I hunger to know… I record, around that, my experience of understanding the world and understanding what it means to live a good life, to live a full life. Anything that I write is a byproduct of that — but that’s not the objective. So, even if it may have the appearance of “producing” something on a regular basis, it’s really about taking in, and what I put out is just … the byproduct.” Maria Popova, curator of brainpickings.org

“If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Toni Morrison

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Maya Angelou

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.” Pablo Picasso

“We should not look down on work nor look down on [our early works] as failures. To fail is to give up. But you are in the midst of a moving process. Nothing fails then. All goes on. Work is . If good, you learn from it. If bad, you learn even more. Work and behind you is a lesson to be studied. There is no failure unless one stops. Not to work is to cease, tighten up, become nervous and therefore destructive of the creative process.” Ray Bradbury

“The more you reason the less you create.” Raymond Chandler

“The impossible is often the untried.” Jim Goodwin

“All great discoveries are made by people whose feelings run ahead of their thinking.” Charles Parkhurst

“There is something deep within us that responds to those who level with us, who don’t suggest or compromise for us.” Susan Scott, Fierce Leadership

“Since intuition operates lower down than the frontal lobe, it is not easy to talk about how it works. In general, I tend not to pay much attention to it until I have completed all of my research, compiled my lists of pros and cons, and made a rational decision based on facts. Then, when I cannot sleep because the rational decision seems all wrong to me, I start paying attention to the gyroscope of my intuition, which operates below the radar of my reason. I pay attention to recurring dreams and interesting coincidences. I let my feelings off the leash and follow them around. When something moves in my peripheral vision, I leave the path to investigate, since it would be a shame to walk right by a burning bush. At this point, reason is all but useless to me. All that remains is trust. Will I trust my intuition or won’t I? The more I do, the more intuitive I become. This is as close as I can come to describing the guidance of the Holy Spirit.” Barbara Brown Taylor

“The wastebasket is a writer’s best friend”. Isaac Bashevis Singer

“There are some things that are so serious you have to laugh at them.” Niels Bohr

“Adversity is just change that we haven’t adapted ourselves to yet.” Aimee Mullins

“It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.” Arthur Erickson

“People who don’t take risks generally make about 2 big mistakes a year, people who do take risks generally make about 2 big mistakes a year.” Peter Drucker

“Don’t be a passive consumer. Create and inspire others.” The Creativity Workshop

“Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.” John Cleese

“In the dim background of our mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.” William James

“We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve.” Albert Einstein

“Stop thinking. Use your instincts.” The Creativity Workshop

“The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.” Eric Hoffer

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” Robert F. Kennedy

“In my experience, if you steer clear of dogma and muster up more love than you thought you had to give, then your vitality increases, satisfaction sets in, sweetness surfaces. I believe in the creative power of good feelings. I’m convinced that the desire to be real is everyone’s divine imperative.” Danielle LaPorte

“We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this becomes a real art… Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, never leaving the single growth of the psychic processes in peace.” Carl Jung

“We are most truly ourselves when we achieve the seriousness of a child at play.” Heroclitus

“I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.” Pearl S. Buck

“They thought I was crazy, absolutely mad”. Barbara McClintock. The response (1944) of the National Academy of Sciences, to her (later Nobel prize-winning) theory that proposed that genes could transition—’jumping’—to new locations on a chromosome.

“Play is serious business. At stake for us are the ways we socialize and teach future generations of scientists, inventors, artists, explorers, and other individuals who will shape the work in which we live. It is safe to say that humans, as a species, have always had a concept of play. But only recently has play begun getting the serious attention it deserves as a source of discovery.” Arthur Molella, Lemelson Center Director

“Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.” Rita Mae Brown

“If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.” Woody Allen

“If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.” Thomas
Watson

“The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ¬honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.” Neil Gaiman

“Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary.” Maurice Baring

“Too much of our work amounts to the drudgery of arranging means toward ends, mechanically placing the right foot in front of the left and the left in front of the right, moving down narrow corridors toward narrow goals. Play widens the halls. Work will always be with us, and many works are worthy. But the worthiest works of all often reflect an artful creativity that looks more like play than work.” James Ogilvy

“Ideas are cheap. Always be passionate about ideas and communicating those ideas and discoveries to others in the things you make.” Charles Eames

“You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn’t nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.” Anne Lamott

“We concentrate on creative process rather than product and on the idea of creativity as a way of viewing and appreciating life.” The Creativity Workshop

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity”. Ray Bradbury

“Of course, writing does require one to intensely focus–yet simultaneously to go ranging far and wide, entertaining a panoply of possibilities, living in several worlds at once. It’s counterintuitive. It defies common sense. Maybe that’s why rational people get so frustrated by it.” Tom Robbins

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant”. Albert Einstein

“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.” Thomas Huxley

Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, felt that the pioneer scientist must have “a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination.”

“Serious play is not an oxymoron; it is the essence of innovation.” Michael Schrage


“The chief enemy of creativity is “good” sense.” Pablo Picasso

“Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head.” Mark Twain

“I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.” Franklin P. Adams

“Knowledge itself is power.” Francis Bacon

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

“It is a happy talent to know how to play.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“All great ideas are dangerous.” Oscar Wilde

“Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors.” W. Eugene Smith

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” Steve Jobs

“To get a great idea, come up with lots of them.” Thomas Edison

“It’s not that I’m am so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” Albert Einstein

“When all think alike, then no one is thinking.” Walter Lippman

“Trust your instincts.” The Creativity Workshop

“To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.” Aristotle

“In my head and in my soul many artistic conceptions flash and make themselves felt. But they only flash; and what’s needed is a full embodiment, which always comes about unexpectedly and suddenly, but it is impossible to calculate precisely when it will come about; then, once you have received the full image in your heart, you can set about its artistic realization.” Dostoevsky on his creative process

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” John Cage

“Your imagination is worth more than you imagine.” Louis Aragon

“A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic” Carl Sagan

“There is no doubt that even the greatest musical geniuses have sometimes worked without inspiration. This guest (inspiration) does not always respond to the first invitation. We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood, without endeavouring to meet it half-way, we easily become indolent and apathetic. We must be patient, and believe that inspiration will come to those who can master their disinclination.’” Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

“Far better to live your own path imperfectly than to live another’s perfectly.” Bhagavad Gita

“In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, but in the experts mind there are few.” Shunryu Suzuki

“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

“The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and most compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capabilities and talents.” Eric Hoffer

”You can make mistakes, but you are not a failure until you blame others for those mistakes.” John Wooden

“To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.” Matthew Arnold

“It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning.” Lincoln Steffens

“To be able to stand not knowing long enough for something alive to take shape!” Lynda Barry

“We believe that creativity is best served in a playful, nurturing, and non-competitive environment where freedom and focus go hand in hand.” The Creativity Workshop

“Dream your dreams out-loud.” The Creativity Workshop

“Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual. There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers.” Ray Bradbury

“We cannot live through a single day without making an impact on the world around us — and we have a choice as to what sort of difference we make.” Jane Goodall

“The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.” Agnes de Mille

“The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not. Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly.” Hugh MacLeod

“The fear of being wrong is the prime inhibitor of the creative process.” Jean Bryant

“Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes.” John Cage

“Vision is the true creative rhythm.” Robert Delaunay

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” Edgar Allan Poe

“Procrastination: the number one killer of creative work.” The Creativity Workshop

“What gets projects for me is not inspiration. I have no idea what inspiration really is. I know that I get really curious about things, and when that gets mixed with rigor, a project gets completed. And that’s basically it, it’s that simple. When curiosity and rigor get together, something happens. And when one of these things [isn’t] there, nothing happens, or the project doesn’t really reach people.” Andrew Zuckerman, photographer

“If the little voice inside you says you must create, it is time to listen.” The Creativity Workshop

“We teach from the point of view that people are by nature creative and that creativity, like DNA, is unique in each individual.”

“One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing…. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.” Alain De Botton

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.” Pablo Picasso

“Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.” John Updike

”Our exercises are broad paradigms that each participant can easily tailor to his goals whether it is particular specialty or life in general.” The Creativity Workshop

“We work with trusting your process, combating debilitating self-criticism and the fear of failure that lead to creative blocks.” The Creativity Workshop

“Capital isn’t so important in business. Experience isn’t so important. You can get both these things. What is important is ideas. If you have ideas, you have the main asset you need, and there isn’t any limit to what you can do with your business and your life.” Harvey Firestone

“Play is our brain’s favorite way of learning.” Diane Ackerman

“If you have the same ideas as everybody else but have them one week earlier than everyone else then you will be hailed as a visionary. But if you have them five years earlier you will be named a lunatic.” Barry Jones

“When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.” Eleanor Roosevelt

“So many things get erased from us, and I mean really erased early on, not only because of what other people say, but what we feel about what they say. You have to be a really tough kid to survive with your creativity in tact into adulthood. But, it is possible. Very, very possible especially when it is against all the odds.” Shelley Berc, Director, The Creativity Workshop

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart,…you’ll know when you find it.” Steve Jobs

“A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.” Frank Capra

“Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.” George Lois

“Thought is more important than art. Art is one of the many products of thought. An impressive one, perhaps the most impressive one, but to revere art, and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.” Amiri Baraka

“Play is the exultation of the possible.” Martin Buber

“Crushing your uniqueness is unacceptable.” The Creativity Workshop

“People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.” William Butler Yeats

“It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living” D.W. Winnicott

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Michael Jordan

“What is Art? It is the response of man’s creative soul to the call of the Real.” Rabindranath Tagore

“The Possible’s slow fuse is lit By the Imagination.” Emily Dickinson

“From the living fountain of instinct flows everything that is creative; hence the unconscious is not merely conditioned by history, but is the very source of the creative impulse.” Carl Jung

“Here is a strange thing — almost like a secret. You start out putting words down and there are three things — you, the pen, and the page. Then gradually the three things merge until they are all one and you feel about the page as you do about your arm.” Excerpted from John Steinbeck’s journal on writing Grapes of Wrath

“Almost all creativity involves purposeful play.” Abraham Maslow

“It hinders the creative work of the mind if the intellect examines too closely the ideas as they pour in.” Friedrich Schiller

“The imagination is an infinite place. Explore every day of your life.” The Creativity Workshop

“An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.” Edwin Land

“It is only doubt that creates. It is the minority that counts.” H.L. Mencken

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” Mark Twain

“… originality consists of the achievement of new combinations, and not of the creation of something out of nothing.” Richard V. Clemence

“My parents taught me to believe that through the creative act, we’re able to transcend and give a response to desecration.” Atom Egoyan

“It is in fact the discovery and creation of problems rather than any superior knowledge, technical skill, or craftsmanship that often sets the creative person apart from others in his field.” Daniel Pink

“Be simple and always take the next step. You needn’t see it in advance, but you can look back at it afterwards. There is no ‘how’ of life, one just does it.” Carl Jung

“You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.” Albert Camus

“It is the function of creative man to perceive and to connect the seemingly unconnected.” William Plomer

“He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.” Joseph Joubert

“When ideas fail, words come in very handy.” Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”
Emily Dickinson

“When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.” Isak Dinesen

“Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish.” Ovid

“No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.” Sir Isaac Newton

“To get the truth, you want to get your own heart to pound while you write.” Robert McKee

“You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” Jack London

“In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with certain alienated majesty.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood.” Carl Jung

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Albert Einstein

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.” Virginia Woolf

“The things we fear most in organizations—fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances—are the primary sources of creativity.” Margaret J. Wheatley

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.” Ray Bradbury

“When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best – that is inspiration.” Robert Bresson

“Learning is movement from moment to moment.” Krishnamurti

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” Howard Aiken

“I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.” Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night

“If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.” Toni Morrison

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” Albert Einstein

“No one had ever had an idea in a dress suit.” Frederick G. Banting

“Creativity is a talent we are all born with. But it needs practice to stay vibrant and grow.” The Creativity Workshop

“Mistakes are the portals of discovery.” James Joyce

“The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose within him.” Carl Jung

“Take your pleasure seriously.” Charles Eames

“Down with Writer’s Block!” The Creativity Workshop

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

“There ain’t no rules around here. We’re trying to accomplish something.” Thomas Edison

“The truth is more important than the facts.” Frank Lloyd Wright

“The lesson is to unlearn all lessons.” Alejandro Fogel, Director, The Creativity Workshop

“A mind once expanded can never return to its original dimensions.” Anne Hathaway

“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” Linus Pauling

“I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.” Albert Einstein

“Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.” Eleanor Roosevelt

“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant — there is no such thing. “Making your unknown known is the important thing.” Georgia O’Keefe

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

“Imagination rules the world.” Napoleon

“I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others… I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent” Thomas Edison

“Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.” George Lois

“There’s a way to do it better – find it.” The Creativity Workshop

“Perfection is your archenemy.” The Creativity Workshop

“If you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.” Carl Jung

“Don’t hire a dog, then bark yourself” David Ogilvy

“Imagination comes first, second and third.” The Creativity
Workshop

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Albert Einstein

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” Unknown


“Inspiration is the air we breathe. Take a deep breath now.”
The Creativity Workshop

“Inspirational genius: Does the soul have a cerebral basis?” The Creativity Workshop

“Allow yourself to make mistakes.” The Creativity Workshop

“Process is the breath of the creative spirit.“ The Creativity Workshop

“Things are there to be tried, and unless we try them how will we ever get to know whether or not they work?” Unknown


“Man’s mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.” Oliver Wendell Holmes

“You cannot be a creator AND a victim.” Unknown

“We are all born creative. Believe it and get to work.” The Creativity Workshop

“Every human being is a shapeshifter. Let yours out.” The Creativity Workshop

“Nobody has your unique imagination. Let it out.” The Creativity Workshop

“Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t have what it takes to be creative.” The Creativity Workshop

“When was the first time in your life you thought about creating? “The Creativity Workshop

“Creativity: Use it or loose it!” The Creativity Workshop

“Amateur means ‘to love what you do’. Do you?” The Creativity Workshop

“We work with learning to recognize and trust your imagination’s instincts.” The Creativity Workshop