Think Outside-the-Box With These 75 Creativity Quotes To Inspire Your Imagination

Express yourself and embrace creative outlets with these inspiring quotes.

How many times have you ventured to create something only to hit a wall? You may have had tons of great ideas yesterday but today you are hearing crickets. All of those good thoughts are forgotten in all the chaos of life. When times like these happen, we may just need a little encouragement to get ourselves back on track. Hearing what creative people have to say about creative thinking can give us just the little push we need to let our imaginations flow and that's where good creativity quotes can become lifesavers.

Sometimes, you may start out working on a creative project but then self-doubt comes rearing its ugly head. As Sylvia Plath has said, "The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." We need to let our minds go free to be creative. If you are having a difficult time expressing yourself, we have the perfect collection of quotes on creativity to help you out.

Here are 75 of the best creativity quotes, we have found from famous creators, to give you renewed inspiration.

Related: 75 Art Quotes That Speak to the Soul and Inspire Creativity!

Best Creativity Quotes

1. "Creativity is seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought.” — Albert Einstein

2. “Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the things you can think up if only you try!” — Dr. Seuss

3. “Every child is an artist, the problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” — Pablo Picasso

4. “Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.” — Dorothy Parker

5. “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” — Sylvia Plath

6. “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery

7. “If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.” — Ken Robinson

8. “You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” — Maya Angelou

9. “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” — Scott Adams

10. “Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.” — Brenda Ueland

11. “Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” — Erich Fromm

12. “Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity” — T.S. Eliot

13, “Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.” — Austin Kleon

14. “A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.” — Criss Jami

15. “The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.” — Ernest Hemingway

16. “It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.” — Chuck Palahniuk

17. “I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.”— Madonna

18. “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” — Joseph Chilton Pearce

19. “Creativity is an act of defiance.”— Twyla Tharp

20. “Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.” — Red Haircrow

21. “Let your creative and imaginative mind run freely; it will take you places you never dreamed of and provide breakthroughs that others once thought were impossible.” — Idowu Koyenikan

22. “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

23. “The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.” — G.K. Chesterton

24. “What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul.” — Deepak Chopra

25. “Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.” — Richard Buckminster Fuller

Related: Wired to Create: 10 Habits of Creative People

Creative Quotes To Contemplate

26. “You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.” — Lewis Carroll

27. “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan

28. “Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.” — Beatrix Potter

29. “Non-judgment quiets the internal dialogue, and this opens once again the doorway to creativity.” — Deepak Chopra

30. “I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.” — Criss Jami

31. “Creativity is intelligence having fun.” — Albert Einstein

32. “Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.” — Arthur Koestler

33. “Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.” — Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

34. “The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” — Robert Henri

35. “Clear thinking at the wrong moment can stifle creativity.” — Karl Lagerfeld

36. “In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.” — Rollo May

37. “You don’t make art out of good intentions.” — Gustave Flaubert

38. “It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.” — Lois McMaster Bujold

39. “I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.” — J.K. Rowling

40. “We nurture our creativity when we release our inner child. Let it run and roam free. It will take you on a brighter journey.” — Serina Hartwell

41. “Creativity doesn’t wait for that perfect moment. It fashions its own perfect moments out of ordinary ones.” — Bruce Garrabrandt

42. “An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.” — Edwin Land

43. “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”— Saul Bellow

44. “I dwell in possibility.” — Emily Dickinson

45. “A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.” — Henry Ford

46. “There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.” — Mark Twain

47. “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” — John Maynard Keynes

48. “If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

49. “Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.” — Brendan Francis Brown

50. “Create. Not for the money. Not for the fame. Not for the recognition. But for the pure joy of creating something and sharing it.” — Ernest Barbaric

Related: Add These Happy Little Messages to Your Day—Here Are the 60 Best Bob Ross Quotes

Inspiring Creative Quotes

51. “I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.” — Leonard Bernstein

52. “All good work requires self-revelation.” — Sidney Lumet

53. “The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain.” — Nikola Tesla

54. “Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.” — Virginia Woolf

55. “If your business plan depends on suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.” — Hugh MacLeod

56. “My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life.” — Miles Davis

57. “Get out of your mind and become crazy about your future in a creative way!” — Michael Bassey Johnson

58. “A picture might be worth a thousand words but a good sentence is worth a thousand windows.” — Mati Klarwein

59. “There are some people who live in a dream world, and some who face reality and then there are those who turn one into the other.” — Douglas Everett

60. “The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.” — Saul Steinberg

61. “What if the very reason you were created was to be creative?” — Michelle Dennis Evans

62. “As the story grew, it put down roots into the past and threw out unexpected branches .” — J.R.R. Tolkien

63. “Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while working.” — Henri Matisse

64. “If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.” — Twyla Tharp

65. “They're only crayons. You didn't fear them in Kindergarten, why fear them now?” — Hugh MacLeod

66. “When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience is a most excellent teacher.” — Frederic Chopin

67. “Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.” — Jacob Bronowski

68. “Find your authentic voice, become vulnerable, and then put yourself out there.” — Meredith Brooks

69. “Arrogance kills creativity.” — A.M. Riley

70. “Creativity is the brain's invisible muscle -- that when used and exercised routinely -- becomes better and stronger.” — Ashley Ormon

71. “The creative strength is good enough and deep enough to bring itself to flower and to grow in spite of this sickness.” — Joanne Greenberg

72. “I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.” — Arthur Holitscher

73. “You have to be willing to spend time making things for no known reason.” — Lynda Barry

74. “We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.” — Dave Eggers

75. “A culture of unaccountability is a culture without incentive, and a culture without incentive is the death of critical and creative thinking.” — Michael R. LeGault

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