Quotes About Creativity

A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way," Einstein once said, "but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.

How did he get his ideas? "I'm enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

The best and most innovative products don't always win...(it's an) aesthetic flaw in how the universe worked

But I did learn from Leonardo how a desire to marvel about the world that we encounter each day can make each moment of our lives richer.

Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.

Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. It was great, he recalled. I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the whole field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat.

I was on one of my fruitarian diets Steve Jobs recalled I had just comeback from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge of the word 'computer', plus it would get us a head of Atari in the phone book. He told Wozniak if a better name did not hit them by the next afternoon, they would just stick with apple and they did.  1 Apr 1976 

We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.

There would be times when we'd rack our brains on a user interface problem, and think we'd considered every option, and he would go, Did you think of this? said Fadell. And then we'd all go, Holy Shit. He'd redefine the problem or approach, and our little problem would go away.

The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.

In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.

If we want to resist the powers that threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom, we must be clear what is at stake," he said. "Without such freedom there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur, no Lister." Freedom was a foundation for creativity.

You always have to keep pushing to innovate.

he never finished any of the works he began because, so sublime was his idea of art, he saw faults even in the things that to others seemed miracles.

Innovation requires articulation.

When he was turning thirty, Jobs had used a metaphor about record albums. He was musing about why folks over thirty develop rigid thought patterns and tend to be less innovative. People get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them, he said. At age forty-five, Jobs was now about to get out of his groove.

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom

innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact. When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.

Sometimes, to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his collegues.

Leonardo da Vinci liked to boast that, because he was not formally educated, he had to learn from his own experiences instead

When a person can take pleasure in marching in step to a piece of music it is enough to make me despise him. He has been given his big brain only by mistake.

authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired, and creativity should be nurtured.

Leonardo's relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least