Are you currently stuck or feeling creatively drained? Then a little inspiration to boost your creativity is what you need. One of the best places to look for inspiration is often found in the writings of creative people you look up to. That’s why we took it upon ourselves to collect some of the best creativity quotes below to inspire you so you can start creating great things once again.
Creativity Quotes
1. The chief enemy of creativity is good sense. – Pablo Picasso
2. The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness. – Joan Miró
3. He who would be a man must, therefore, be a nonconformist. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
4. The most talented, thought-provoking, game-changing people are never normal. – Richard Branson
5. If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things. – Larry Page
6. Create with the heart, build with the mind. – Criss Jami
7. Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion. – Jack Kerouac
8. The most dangerous idea is silencing people. – Naval Ravikant
9. Originality is the best form of rebellion. – Mike Sasso
10. Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change. – Brené Brown
11. If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes. – Pablo Picasso
12. Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. – Gustave Flaubert
13. You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. – Maya Angelou
14. The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose. – James Baldwin
15. We adore chaos because we love to produce order. – M. C. Escher
16. How to unlock creativity, slow down, study another field, get into nature, get out of office, music, sketch, cardio before or after, nibble on small ideas, throw stuff away, atomize the work, look for orthogonal inspiration, breathe, learn about circadian rhythm, paint. – Brian Norgard
17. When you can do a common thing in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world. – George Washington Carver
18. Great things are not done by impulse, but a series of small things brought together. – Vincent Van Gogh
19. If you’re to create something powerful and important, you must at the very least be driven by an equally powerful inner force. – Ryan Holiday
20. If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative. – David Ogilvy
21. An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. – Oscar Wilde
22. A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things in this world. If you want to be able to do great things, whether you’re a musician, or whether you’re an entrepreneur, or whether you’re an investor, you need free time and you need a free mind. – Naval Ravikant
23. In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of life. – T.C. Boyle
24. Social media has colonized what was once a sacred space occupied by emptiness: the space reserved for thought and creativity. – Mahershala Ali
25. The important thing for you is to be alert, to question, to find out, so that your own initiative may be awakened. – Bruce Lee
26. Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit. – E. E. Cummings
27. When we build, let us think that we build forever. – John Ruskin
28. The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. – Dorothy Parker
29. It may be that our cosmic curiosity is a genetically-encoded force that we illuminate when we look up and wonder. – Neil deGrasse Tyson
30. The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers. – Arthur Koestler
31. 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. – Rainer Maria Rilke
32. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time. – John Stuart Mill
33. Art, freedom and creativity will change society faster than politics. – Victor Pinchuk
34. So go on, get angry. But keep your mouth shut and go do your work. – Austin Kleon
35. Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. – Carl Sagan
36. The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration. – Claude Monet
37. It doesn’t have to be amazing, it just has to be authentic. – Elizabeth Gilbert
38. The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. – Albert Einstein
39. If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. – Albert Einstein
40. Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions. – Albert Einstein
41. Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. – Albert Einstein
42. You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created. – Albert Einstein
43. Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience. – Albert Einstein
44. Creativity is contagious, pass it on. – Albert Einstein
45. I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious. – Albert Einstein
46. Imagination is more important than knowledge. – Albert Einstein
47. A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. – Albert Einstein
48. I never think of the future, it comes soon enough. – Albert Einstein
49. We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. – Albert Einstein
50. Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. – Albert Einstein
51. Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning. – Albert Einstein
52. Creativity is just connecting things. – Steve Jobs
53. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. – Steve Jobs
54. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected. – Steve Jobs
55. You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. – Steve Jobs
56. The way to ratchet up our species is to get better things to more people products with spirit and creativity. – Steve Jobs
57. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. – Steve Jobs
58. Stay hungry, stay foolish. – Steve Jobs
59. Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things. – Ray Bradbury
60. Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. – Marilyn Monroe
61. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. – Sylvia Plath
62. Creativity makes life more fun and more interesting. – Edward de Bono
63. The comfort zone is the great enemy to creativity. – Dan Stevens
64. Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. – Erich Fromm
65. The chief enemy of creativity is good sense. – Pablo Picasso
66. There is a fountain of youth, it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life. – Sophia Loren
67. An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. – Edwin Land
68. Anxiety is part of creativity, the need to get something out. – David Duchovny
69. Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found. – James Russell Lowell
70. Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity. – T. S. Eliot
71. Creativity makes a leap, then looks to see where it is. – Mason Cooley
72. We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down. – Kurt Vonnegut
73. Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth. – Rumi
74. Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. – Henry Thomas Buckle
75. Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. – Pablo Picasso,
76. Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions. – Albert Einstein
77. Creativity takes courage. – Henri Matisse
78. Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. – Pablo Picasso
79. Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. – Walt Disney Company
80. I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking. – Albert Einstein
81. To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it. – Osho
82. There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun. – Pablo Picasso
83. Doors are for people with no imagination. – Derek Landy
84. When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you’re writing about at the time. – Lady Gaga
85. The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands. – Leonardo da Vinci
86. The chief enemy of creativity is good sense. – Pablo Picasso
87. 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
88. One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. – Friedrich Nietzsche
89. You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out. – Steve Jobs
90. Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change. – Brene Brown
91. 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
92. If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. – Ken Robinson
93. The urge to destroy is also a creative urge. – Mikhail Bakunin
94. There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time. – Coco Chanel
95. A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I’ll take A Midsummer Night’s Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh. – Stephen King
96. 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-Exupery
97. Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express. – Brenda Ueland
98. Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. – Scott Adams
99. There is creative reading as well as creative writing. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
100. I think that you’ve got to make something that pleases you and hope that other people feel the same way. – Thomas Keller
101. Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. – Stella Adler
102. In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again. – Anais Nin
103. Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path. – Brené Brown,
104. I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen. – Ernest Hemingway
105. 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
106. Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don’t come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they’re having a piss. – Banksy
107. There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard. There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen. There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of them yield more flavours than can ever be tasted. – Sun Tzu
108. I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within. – Gustave Flaubert
109. Everyone is born creative, everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the ‘creative bug’ is just a wee voice telling you, ‘I’d like my crayons back, please.’ – Hugh MacLeod
110. 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
111. Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library. – John Waters
112. It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it. – Jacob Bronowski
113. People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory. – Karl Lagerfeld
114. For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable, intoxication. – Friedrich Nietzsche
115. It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry, for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom. Without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. – Albert Einstein
116. It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them. – Eudora Welty
117. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. – Mary Shelly
118. The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little. – Banksy
119. 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
120. Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable. – William Pollard
121. Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. – Steve Jobs
120. The comfort zone is the great enemy to creativity; moving beyond it necessitates intuition, which in turn configures new perspectives and conquers fears. – Dan Stevens
122. Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level. – A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
123. Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, then you’re more willing to take risks. – Yo-Yo Ma
124. Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is the result of good work habits. – Twyla Tharp
125. Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way. – Edward de Bono
126. Femininity is not just lipstick, stylish hairdos, and trendy clothes. It is the divine adornment of humanity. It finds expression in your qualities of your capacity to love, your spirituality, delicacy, radiance, sensitivity, creativity, charm, graciousness, gentleness, dignity, and quiet strength. – James E. Faust
127. I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few. – Brene Brown
128. Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it. – Dee Hock
129. Stress and worry, they solve nothing. What they do is block creativity. You are not even able to think about the solutions. Every problem has a solution. – Susan L. Taylor
130. There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age. – Sophia Loren
131. Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs. – Joe Biden
132. Get into your own creativity. Sketch and paint with different mediums and follow your heart. – Peter Max
133. Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries, the arts and humanities. – Lisa Randall
134. Sometimes you’ve got to let everything go – purge yourself. If you are unhappy with anything whatever is bringing you down, get rid of it. Because you’ll find that when you’re free, your true creativity, your true self comes out. – Tina Turner
135. In my experience, poor people are the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. Every day, they must innovate in order to survive. They remain poor because they do not have the opportunities to turn their creativity into sustainable income. – Muhammad Yunus
136. Let us be about setting high standards for life, love, creativity, and wisdom. If our expectations in these areas are low, we are not likely to experience wellness. Setting high standards makes every day and every decade worth looking forward to. – Greg Anderson
137. Creativity is a natural extension of our enthusiasm. – Earl Nightingale
