To create is to cause something to exist by one’s actions. Creativity and the creative process are about taking original ideas, inspired from imagination, and then producing something new. To be creative means to generate original ideas and possibilities that will, when applied, be useful, entertaining, or beautiful, or otherwise worthwhile. What part discipline and spontaneity play in creativity are matters of debate. Artists and thinkers have tried to put into words what creativity is about. Here are some of those words.
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.
Determine the thing that can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way.
Almost all creativity involves purposeful play.
To stimulate creativity one must develop childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition.
Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
Discovery consists in seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.
The computer brings out the uptight perfectionist in us — we start editing ideas before we have them.
American families have always shown remarkable resiliency, or flexible adjustment to natural, economic, and social challenges. Their strengths resemble the elasticity of a spider web, a gull’s skillful flow with the wind, the regenerating power of perennial grasses, the cooperation of an ant colony, and the persistence of a stream carving canyon rocks. These are not the strengths of fixed monuments but living organisms. This resilience is not measured by wealth, muscle or efficiency but by creativity, unity, and hope. Cultivating these family strengths is critical to a thriving human community.
Creativeness often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When people really listen to each other in a quiet, fascinated attention, the creative fountain inside each of us begins to spring and cast up new thoughts and unexpected wisdom.
So you see, imagination needs noodling — long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling, and puttering.
Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.
Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.
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.
Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth.
The creative mind plays with the object it loves.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.
When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by the world, but by a million possible worlds.
No abundance of material goods can compensate for the death of individuality and personal creativity.
Our secret creative will divines its counterpart in others, experiencing its own universality, and this intuition builds a road towards knowledge of the power which is itself a spark within us.
Perhaps what differentiates highly creative ideas from ordinary ones is some combined sense of beauty, simplicity, and harmony.
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
In the case of the creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude. You worthy critics, or whatever you may call yourselves, are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and passing madness which is found in all real creators, the longer or shorter duration of which distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. Hence your complaints of unfruitfulness, for you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.
The human mind isn’t a computer; it cannot progress in an orderly fashion down a list of candidate moves and rank them by a score down to the hundredth of a pawn the way a chess machine does. Even the most disciplined human mind wanders in the heat of competition. This is both a weakness and a strength of human cognition. Sometimes these undisciplined wanderings only weaken your analysis. Other times they lead to inspiration, to beautiful or paradoxical moves that were not on your initial list of candidates.
