Quotes About Creativity

Piping down the valleys wild,Piping songs of pleasant glee,On a cloud I saw a child,And he laughing said to me:"Pipe a song about a Lamb."So I piped with merry cheer;"Piper, pipe that song again."So I piped; he wept to hear.

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.

The man who never in his mind and thoughts travel'd to heaven is no artist.

Poetry fettered fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed, or flourish, in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish!

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal the good one really does.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.

Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he has thought of the dull, commonplace rich.

None can imitate life without the intermediary of art.

Who can enjoy acting in an empty theater ?

Lacking clear systems and signals, the neutral zone is a chaotic time, but this lack is also the reason the neutral zone is more hospitable to new ideas than settled times. Because the neutral zone automatically puts people into Bessemer's situation, it is a time that is ripe with creative opportunity.

Establish by word and example that this is a time to step back and take stock, a time to question the "usual," and a time to come up with new and creative solutions to the organization's difficulties. Explain how business as usual chokes off creativity and explain why the present is the best possible time to generate and test new ideas. Model this new manner yourself by taking time to step back and question how your own job is done.

The task before you is therefore twofold: first, to get your people through this phase of transition in one piece; and second, to capitalize on all the confusion by encouraging them to be innovative.

Encourage learning in the areas of discovery and innovation. This is the time for even more creative thinking and greater focus on innovation.

Encourage experimentation. People always have ideas that they have been wishing they had the chance to try, and they naturally generate solutions to problems they've been living with. What they seldom do, without encouragement and support, is try their ideas. Too often experimentation seems to people a risky undertaking that requires someone else's blessing. Give it yours.

Look for opportunities to brainstorm new answers to old problems. You have lived with them for so long that you may have unwittingly given up any hope of solving them. Break through this block, not by finding the single right answer but by finding 10 or 20 new answers—the crazier, the better.

What is called "innovation" usually represents a new Dream.

But immune systems carry a price tag: even good germs get filtered out or killed off. The pre-transition immune system choked off creativity in its own manner, and no matter how loose and free the post-transition way of doing things is, its immune system will also make creativity difficult in some different way. It is during the gap between the old and the new that the organization's immune system is weak enough to let a seedbed for novelty form.

It's not that [writers] are pompous jerks. We are insecure. We feel like we're fading away in this vast sea of scriveners.

In a society that has cast out imaginative tradition, only a few people - three or four thousand out of millions - favoured by their own characters and by happy circumstance, and only then after much labour, have understanding of imaginative things, and yet "the imagination is the man himself".

Even when the poet seems most himself… he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

Down the mountain wallsFrom where Pan's cavern isIntolerable music falls.Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,Belly, shoulder, bum,Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrsCopulate in the foam.

He that sings a lasting songThinks in a marrowbone.

Irish poets, learn your trade,Sing whatever is well made.