Explore Quotes on Creativity

All new ideas begin in a non-conforming mind that questions some tenet of the conventional wisdom.

Backwards understood be only can but, forwards lived be must life.

Creativity comes by breaking the rules, by saying that you're in love with the anarchist.

An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.

Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which the problems were created.

Creativity is the generation and initial development of new, useful ideas. Innovation is the successful implementation of those ideas in an organization. Thus, no innovation is possible without the creative processes that mark the front end of the process: identifying important problems and opportunities, gathering relevant information, generating new ideas, and exploring the validity of those ideas.

Beware of the tyranny of making small changes to small things. Rather, make big changes to big things.

Every improvement or innovation begins with an idea. But an idea is only a possibility - a small beginning that must be nurtured, developed, engineer, tinkered with, championed, tested, implemented and checked ideas have no value until they are implemented.

Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway to life.

From study of known normal brains we have learned that there is a certain range of variation. No two brains are exactly alike, and the greatest source of error in the assertions of Benedict and Lombroso has been the finding of this or that variation in a criminal's brains, and maintaining such to be characteristic of the 'criminal constitution,' unmindful of the fact that like variations of structure may and do exist in the brains of normal, moral persons.

Long intervals frequently elapse between the discovery of new principles in science and their practical application... Those intellectual qualifications, which give birth to new principles or to new methods, are of quite a different order from those which are necessary for their practical application.

Creative geniuses are a slap-happy lot. Treat Them with respect.

There are many points in the history of an invention which the inventor himself is apt to overlook as trifling, but in which posterity never fail to take a deep interest. The progress of the human mind is never traced with such a lively interest as through the steps by which it perfects a great invention; and there is certainly no invention respecting which this minute information will be more eagerly sought after, than in the case of the steam-engine.

[About the great synthesis of atomic physics in the 1920s:] It was a heroic time. It was not the doing of any one man; it involved the collaboration of scores of scientists from many different lands. But from the first to last the deeply creative, subtle and critical spirit of Niels Bohr guided, restrained, deepened and finally transmuted the enterprise.

The spark of a genius exists in the brain of the truly creative man from the hour of his birth. True genius is always inborn and never cultivated, let alone learned.

The future is uncertain... but this uncertainty is at the very heart of human creativity.

As I review the nature of the creative drive in the inventive scientists that have been around me, as well as in myself, I find the first event is an urge to make a significant intellectual contribution that can be tangible embodied in a product or process.

The centre of his world was the south where he was born in slavery some 79 years ago and where he did his work as a creative scientist.

Americans have always believed that-within the law-all kinds of people should be allowed to take the initiative in all kinds of activities. And out of that pluralism has come virtually all of our creativity. Freedom is real only to the extent that there are diverse alternatives.

When you create you get a little endorphin rush. Why do you think Einstein looked like that?

I think of myself as a comedian who has the pleasure of writing jokes about things that I actually care about.