Quotes on Creativity and Originality

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

Charles Mingus

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns to look at things in a different way.

Edward De Bono (adapted)

Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.

Oliver wendell Holms

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

R. Buckminster Fuller

If you fall in love with an idea, you won't see the merits of alternative approaches—and will probably miss an opportunity or two. One of life's great pleasures is letting go of a previously cherished idea. Then you're free to look for new ones. What part of your idea are you in love with? What would happen if you kissed it goodbye?

Roger von Oech

Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.

George Kneller

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Erich Fromm

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

Sir Cecil Beaton

Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.

Mary Lou Cook

The essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail.

Edwin H. Land

Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.

Pablo Picasso

Concern over criticism clogs creativity.

Duane Alan Hahn

A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations.

Gerald G. Jampolsky

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Arthur Koestler

When all think alike, then no one is thinking.

Walter Lippman

Minds are like parachutes: they only function when open.

Thomas R. Dewar

He who never walks except where he sees other men's tracks will make no discoveries.

Unknown

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Antonio Porchia

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.

George Lois

A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Oscar Wilde

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

Bernard Berenson

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

Edwin H. Land

I invent nothing, I rediscover.

Auguste Rodin

Nothing is new except arrangement.

William J. Durant

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

Dean William R. Inge

Begin with another's to end with your own.

Baltasar Gracian

Originality is nothing but judicious plagiarism.

Voltaire

To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.

Lichtenberg

The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.

Alan Ashley-Pitt

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

Arthur Koestler