Quotes About Innovation

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.

Every fresh advance which we make only reveals a fresh ridge beyond. And yet we have surely made some appreciable progress.

The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.

I have coined the term 'bisociation' in order to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single 'plane', as it were, and the creative act, which, as I shall try to show, always operates on more than one plane. The former may be called single-minded, the latter a double-minded, transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed.

Complexity of thought is no measure of originality.

Let me repeat: the principle mark of genius is not perfection, but originality, the opening of new frontiers; once this is done, the conquered territory becomes common property.

And yet, by three incorrect steps and their even more correct defence, Kepler stumbled on the correct law. It is perhaps the most amazing sleep-walking performance in the history of science-except for the manner in which he found his First Law, to which we now turn.

The problem of the planetary orbits had been hopelessly bogged down in its purely geometrical frame of reference, and when Kepler realized that he could not get it unstuck, he tore it out of that frame and removed it into the field of physics. This operation of removing a problem from its traditional context and placing it into a new one, looking at it through glasses of of a different colour as it were, has always seemed to me of the very essence of the creative process.

The decisive turning points in the history of every art-form are discoveries which show the characteristic features already discussed: they uncover what has always been there; they are 'revolutionary', that is, destructive and constructive; they compel us to revalue our values and impose a new set of rules on the eternal game.

The creative act of the humorist consisted in bringing about a momentary fusion between two habitually incompatible matrices. Scientific discovery, as we shall presently see, can be described in very similar terms-as the permanent fusion of matrices of thought previously believed to be incompatible.

All decisive advances in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines.

Specialization, in morphogenesis as in other fields, exacts its price in creativity.

It is perhaps significant that the German word for the Creator is Schopfer, and for certain schopfen-'to scoop' in the sense of drawing water in buckets from a well. The Creator is thus visualized as creating the world out of His own depth, and the creative mind with a small c is supposed to apply a similar procedure.

Every creative act involves... a new innocence of perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief.

What a woman! They broke the mould when they made her.

Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn't influenced is never of any use.

The schoolmen peer with dulled eyes from amid the heap of precedents and prescriptions about them, and, distracted by seeing a thing sanctioned neither by precedent nor by prescription, dub the man realist, and rail against him for that his work fits none of their pigeon-holes.

Even when a writer seems to be out of touch with the spirit of the age or voluntarily hostile to it, he will usually be found to represent either an underground current of opposition or the rising tide of tomorrow beating on the crumbling cliffs of yesterday.

True alchemy lies in this formula: 'Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse'.

Genius lives only one storey above madness

A man who has not enough originality to think out a new title for his book will be much less capable of giving it new contents.

Said in reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein: Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target others cannot even see.

If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age you must keep in step with it. But if you do that you will produce nothing great. If you have something great in view you must address yourself to posterity: only then, to be sure, you will probably remain unknown to your contemporaries; you will be like a man compelled to spend his life on a desert island and there toiling to erect a memorial so that future seafarers shall know he once existed.

Before you take anything away you must have something better to put in its place.