What would our lives look like without creativity? Without those strokes of genius—both big and small—we might be living without our favorite book or carpooling by horse and carriage. A single spark took us from the most rudimentary form of communication to smartphones in less than 150 years! It takes courage to build on an idea, so if you need a little extra push, we’ve got you covered. Here are some creativity quotes to get those creative juices flowing in the classroom.
FREE PRINTABLE
Free Creativity Quotes Posters
Print and hang our bundle of five creativity quotes posters. They’re free to download—just enter your email address in the form on this page!
Our Favorite Creativity Quotes
While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die—whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness. —Gilda Radner
True creativity often starts where language ends. —Arthur Koestler
God is creating at every moment of the world’s existence in and through the perpetually endowed creativity of the very stuff of the world. —Arthur Peacocke
Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way. —Edward de Bono
Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem. —Brian Aldiss
Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work. —Rita Mae Brown
Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. —Ken Robinson
Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience. Computers simply cannot do that. —Masaru Ibuka
Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties. —Gail Sheehy
Originality is the essence of true scholarship. Creativity is the soul of the true scholar. —Nnamdi Azikiwe
Creativeness, like the Freedom of the will, contains a secret. —Carl Jung
That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you. —Ray Bradbury
Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work. —Bob Dylan
Creativity in all forms of life, from arts to business to domestic situations, depends on our ability to recognize and explore gaps. —Itay Talgam
People are too busy putting things under microscopes. Creativity is more than the sum of its parts. —Maya Angelou
Just as blood is a fact of your physical body and nothing you invented, creativity is a fact of your spiritual body and nothing you must invent. —Julia Cameron
We have got to abandon the sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything. —Abraham Maslow
When you are in the field of creativity, you lose track of time. Only the flow exists. —Deepak Chopra
The first task in teaching for creativity in any field is to encourage people to believe in their creative potential and to nurture the confidence to try. —Ken Robinson
Your memory and your senses will be nourishment for your creativity. —Arthur Rimbaud
Art Creativity Quotes
Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. —Rainer Maria Rilke
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth. —Theodor W. Adorno
Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art. —Virginia Woolf
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. —Walter Pater
All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life. —M.C. Richards
We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. —Henry James
Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature. —Susanne Langer
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern. —Alfred North Whitehead
One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement. —Edgar Degas
Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it. —Robert Motherwell
The art of being taught is the art of discovery, as the art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery to take place. —Mark Van Doren
To me, art is not a solitary delight. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men by providing them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes. —Albert Camus
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible. —Paul Klee
Of all the arts, poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank. —Immanuel Kant
The conscious utterance of thought, by speech or action, to any end, is art. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
The productions of all arts are kinds of poetry and their craftsmen are all poets. —Plato
As all Art depends on Vision, so the different kinds of Art depend on the different ways in which minds look at things. —George Henry Lewes
For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction. —C.J. Cherryh
The Arts and Sciences, essential to the prosperity of the State and to the ornament of human life, have a primary claim to the encouragement of every lover of his country and mankind. —George Washington
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do. —Donald Knuth
Imagination Creativity Quotes
A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache. —Catherine the Great
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books. —Gaston Bachelard
Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination—or to intelligence, to love—than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right. —Shirley Hazzard
The travel writer seeks the world we have lost—the lost valleys of the imagination. —Alexander Cockburn
Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life. —Simone Weil
The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer. —Charles Kettering
Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists—with it all things are possible. —Ida Tarbell
Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it. —Walt Disney
Imagination is as vital to any advance in science as learning and precision are essential for starting points. —Percival Lowell
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. —Carl Sagan
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination. —Ishmael Reed
Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it. —Robinson Jeffers
I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see. —Duane Michals
The Possible’s slow fuse is lit by the Imagination. —Emily Dickinson
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s. —Stephen King
Scarcely any degree of judgment is sufficient to restrain the imagination from magnifying that on which it is long detained. —Samuel Johnson
Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination. —Bertrand Russell
What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. —Oscar Wilde
Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake? —Leonardo da Vinci
To an imagination of any scope, the most far-reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas. —Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Vision Creativity Quotes
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. —Carl Jung
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency—the belief that the here and now is all there is. —Allan Bloom
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. —Isaac Bashevis Singer
Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. —Melody Beattie
If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions. —Catherine Drinker Bowen
When I think of vision, I have in mind the ability to see above and beyond the majority. —Chuck Swindoll
To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength. —Lawrence Clark Powell
Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality. —Warren Bennis
As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it’s the aspect. —Orson Welles
Were there no men of vision, all who are blind would be dead. —Rumi
Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision. —G.K. Chesterton
A glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon. —C.S. Lewis
In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. —John F. Kennedy
Attachment constrains our vision so that we are not able to see things from a wider perspective. —Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
We’re gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make “me too” products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it’s always the next dream. —Steve Jobs
With vision there is no room to be frightened. No reason for intimidation. It’s time to march forward! Let’s be confident and positive! —Chuck Swindoll
The artist begins with a vision—a creative operation requiring effort. Creativity takes courage. —Henri Matisse
A common vision can unite people of very different temperaments. —Tim Keller
He who cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day realize it. —James Allen
Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such. —Henry Miller
Genius Creativity Quotes
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius. —Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. —Thomas Edison
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see. —Arthur Schopenhauer
One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius. —Simone de Beauvoir
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius. —Arthur Conan Doyle
Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring. —Marilyn Monroe
He who would acquire fame must not show himself afraid of censure. The dread of censure is the death of genius. —William Gilmore Simms
Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine. —Edmund Wilson
Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together. —Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction. —E.F. Schumacher
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. —Abraham Lincoln
One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire. —John W. Foster
It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public. —Ezra Pound
The charm of the best courages is that they are inventions, inspirations, flashes of genius. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
Never imitate the eccentricities of genius, but toil after it in its truer flights. They are not so easy to follow, but they lead to higher regions. —Charles Dickens
The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius. —Marcel Proust
The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it. —George Bernard Shaw
Genius is formed in quiet, character in the stream of human life. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it. —Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Get my posters!
Don’t forget to grab your free printable creativity quotes posters to hang in your classroom or school hallways!
Come share your favorite creativity quotes in the We Are Teachers HELPLINE group on Facebook!
And if you like these creativity quotes, check out these quotes about confidence for classrooms and schools.
