What is a life without creativity?
I believe a life free from creativity is a life free from joy. Our creativity is the essence of who we are. We have a responsibility to ourselves and to the world to feed from our personal well of inventiveness and imagination. But what can you do when your inner artist eludes you?
Here are 24 creativity quotes that may bring her out to play.
- “The chief enemy of creativity is good sense” – Pablo Picasso
- “Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try” – Dr. Seuss
- “True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found” – Eckhart Tolle
- “Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it” – Dee Hock
- “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” – Walt Disney
- “Every child is an artist, the problem is staying an artist when you grow up” – Pablo Picasso
- “You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not’?” – George Bernard Shaw
- “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” – Scott Adams
- There is no use trying,” said Alice. “One can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Lewis Carroll
- “If you hear a voice within you say, ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” – Vincent van Gogh
- “Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it” – Salvador Dali
- “Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts” – Rita Mae Brown
- “Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people” – Leo Burnett
- “The world is but a canvas to the imagination.” — Henry David Thoreau
- “Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things” – Ray Bradbury
- “We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own and other people’s models, learn to be ourselves and allow our natural channel to open.” — Shakti Gawain
- “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last, you create what you will” – George Bernard Shaw
- “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” — Maya Angelou
- “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” — John Maynard Keynes
- “From 30,000 feet, creating looks like art. From ground level, it’s a to-do list” – Ben Arment
- “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working” – Pablo Picasso
- “You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star” – Nietzsche
- “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources” – Albert Einstein
- “To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.” – Osho
(That last one is my personal favorite.)
So live life a little more today, dance, sing, play and love. See the beauty in life and you will bring out the beauty from within.
Do you have any creativity quotes that you’d like to share? Please do so in the comments below.
(Photo credit: Creative Lettering of Business via Shutterstock)
