Quotes About Creativity

I burned incense, swept the earth, and waited for a poem to come... Then I laughed, and climbed the mountain, leaning on my staff. How I'd love to be a master of the blue sky's art: see how many sprigs of snow-white clouds he's brushed in so far today

Originality consists in thinking for yourself, not in thinking differently from other people. Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873)

Only something extremely dire and disabling will ever stop a real writer from writing. Retirement is never an option.

People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out.

There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish.

Just asking Why and What If will not necessarily cause these neural connections to occur—but questioning can help nourish the trees and extend the reach of those branches.

It also helps to have a wide base of knowledge on all sorts of things that might seem to be unrelated to the problem—the more eclectic your storehouse of information, the more possibilities for unexpected connections.

Always the beautiful answer Who asks a more beautiful question. —E.E. Cummings

the more general problem of schools favoring memorized answers over creative questions is nothing new. Some point out that it's built into an educational system that was created in a different time, the Industrial Age, and for a different purpose.

In the more relaxed state, neural networks open up and connections of all kinds form more freely.

For a questioner, it's important to spend time with challenging questions instead of trying to answer them right away. By "living with" a question, thinking about it and then stepping away from it, allowing it to marinate, you give your brain a chance to come up with the kinds of fresh insights and What If possibilities that can lead to breakthroughs.

Google's scientist-in-residence Ray Kurzweil47 revealed in an interview. He said that when he is working on a difficult problem, he sets aside time, right before going to bed, to review all the pertinent issues and challenges. Then he goes to sleep and allows his unconscious mind to go to work.

In some ways, Meier was trying to extend the kindergarten experience through all grades. Teaching kindergarten "was such an extraordinary intellectual experience, and I thought, Why couldn't we just keep doing that?" Only in kindergarten, she told me, "do we put up with kids asking questions that are off-topic.

And it's possible you may get different results depending on which hand you doodle with," Kounios says. "Using the left hand may stimulate the brain's right hemisphere.

If you fear not having answers to the questions you might ask yourself, remember that one of the hallmarks of innovative problem solvers is that they are willing to raise questions without having any idea of what the answer might be. Part of being able to tackle complex and difficult questions is accepting that there is nothing wrong with not knowing. People who are good at questioning are comfortable with uncertainty.

The designer George Lois, who claims some of his best ideas have come while meandering through the Metropolitan Museum, says, "Museums are the custodians of epiphanies.")

In one of his lectures on creativity, the comedian John Cleese talked about the need to find one's own "tortoise enclosure"—that19 sheltered, quiet place where you can go for extended periods to escape from the distractions of the outside world so that you can think without interruption.

I position myself relentlessly as an idiot at IDEO," Bennett observes. "And that's not a negative, it's a positive. Because being comfortable with not knowing—that's the first part of being able to question.

That's because with each new advance, Thrun said, one must pause to ask, Now that we know what we now know, what's possible now?

We've seen that companies sometimes use a hypothetical What If question to temporarily remove constraints that can inhibit ambitious thinking (What if cost weren't an issue—how might we do things differently?), and the same principle applies when people are pursuing new ideas or embarking on change in their lives. Often the biggest constraint is fear of failure.

That, right there, is a beautiful question for the ages: What do you want to say? Why does it need to be said? What if you could say it in a way that has never before been done? How might you do that?

But if we can't compete with technology when it comes to storing answers, questioning—that uniquely human capacity—is our ace in the hole. Until Watson acquires the equivalent of human curiosity, creativity, divergent thinking skills, imagination, and judgment, it will not be able to formulate the kind of original, counterintuitive, and unpredictable questions an innovative thinker—or even just your average four-year-old—can come up with.

Yes, we want a Silicon Valley," she said, "but do we really want three hundred million people who actually think for themselves?

Basic formula: Q (questioning) + A (action) = I (innovation). On the other hand, Q – A = P (philosophy).