A. A. Milne:

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

Abraham Maslow:

The key question isn't "What fosters creativity?" But it is why in God's name isn't everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.

Albert Einstein:

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

Albert Einstein:

Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

Albert Einstein:

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Arthur Koestler:

Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Beatrix Potter:

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

Buckminster Fuller:

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

Buckminster Fuller:

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

Carl Sagan:

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.

Carl Sagan:

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

Edward de Bono:

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

Edwin Land:

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

Erich Fromm:

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Erich Fromm:

Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.

Franklin D. Roosevelt:

Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

Georg C. Lichtenberg:

Eveyone is a genius at least once a year. A real genius has his original ideas closer together.

Henry David Thoreau:

The world is but a canvas to the imagination.

Lillian Hellman:

Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way to create.

Linus Pauling:

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

Linus Pauling:

The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.

Margaret J. Wheatley:

The things we fear most in organizations -- fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances -- are the primary sources of creativity.

Marie Antoinette:

There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.

Martin Luther King Jr.:

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

Monica Baldwin:

The moment when you first wake up in the morning is the most wonderful of the twenty-four hours. No matter how weary or dreary you may feel, you possess the certainty that, during the day that lies before you, absolutely anything may happen. And the fact that it practically always doesn't, matters not a jot. The possibility is always there.

Niels Bohr:

Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.

Nietzsche:

You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.

Oscar Levant:

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Pablo Picasso:

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely . . . but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude . . .

Ray Bradbury:

Life is "trying things to see if they work."

Rita Mae Brown:

Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.

Rollo May:

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

Saul Steinberg:

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

Sharon Welch:

Injustice can be eliminated, but human conflicts and natural limitations cannot be removed. The conflicts of social life and the limitations of nature cannot be controlled or transcended. They can, however, be endured and survived. It is possible for there to be a dance with life, a creative response to its intrinsic limits and challenges ... [A Feminist Ethic of Risk]

Theodore Adorno:

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

Unknown:

[C]reative ability and personal responsibility are strongest when the mind is free from supernatural belief and operates in an atmosphere of freedom and democracy.

Victor Hugo:

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Virginia Woolf:

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

Virginia Woolf:

It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.

Will Rogers:

If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?

William Golding:

Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.

William James:

Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.