Quotes About Creativity

I hate the common herd of men and keep them afar. Let there be sacred silence: I, the Muses' priest, sing for girls and boys songs not heard before.

Taught or untaught, we all scribble poetry.

Barefaced poverty drove me to writing verses.

"Painters and poets," you say, "have always had an equal license in bold invention." We know; we claim the liberty for ourselves and in turn we give it to others.

Mediocrity is not allowed to poets, either by the gods or man.

Of writing well the source and fountainhead is wise thinking.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

Every drop of ink in my pen ran cold.

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not. A sense of humour was provided to console him for what he is.

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

Superorganism, ideas, and the pecking order—these are the primary forces behind much of human creativity and earthly good. They are the holy trinity of the Lucifer Principle.

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

By introducing these elements at the outset, I wish to stress that all creative activity grows, first, out of the relationships between an individual and the objective world of work and, second, out of the ties between an individual and other human beings.

Indeed, knowledge that one will be judged on some criterion of "creativeness" or "originality" tends to narrow the scope of what one can produce (leading to products that are then judged as relatively conventional); in contrast, the absence of an evaluations seems to liberate creativity.

When Einstein had thought through a problem, he always found it necessary to formulate this subject in as many different ways as possible and to present it so that it would be comprehensible to people accustomed to different modes of thought and with different educational preparations.

Gruber speaks of an "evolving systems" approach to the study of creativity: that is, one monitors simultaneously the organization of knowledge in a domain, the purpose(s) pursued by the creator, and the affective experiences he or she undergoes. While these systems are only "loosely coupled," their interaction over time helps one understand the ebb and flow of creative activity over the course of a productive human life.

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas...

I'm vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you'd get any feedback.

I read to escape...I write to help others escape... --Howard Hopkins, Author of The Chloe Files

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college — that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?"

He would come to school balancing his night's dreams like an acrobat bearing a human pyramid on his shoulders.

An artist owed a duty to nothing except his own irresponsibility. It was OK for an artist to frolic in the water, no matter how bloody the waves or how high the tide rose. An ethicist had an obligation to drown.

I exaggerate but only to revive the dying art of hyperbole.