25 Quotes on Innovation and Creativity

Some days you just need a little bit of motivation to carry on being creative and innovative. Here are 25 reasons to be motivated, that we hope will get you through the week.

1. “There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.” — Martha Graham
2. “When we engage in what we are naturally suited to do, our work takes on the quality of play and it is play that stimulates creativity.” – Linda Naiman
3. “The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.” — Alan Alda
4. “The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things ancient history, nineteenth century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later, or six months, or six years. But he has faith that it will happen.” — Carl Ally
5. “You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” — Jack London
6.  “The world is but a canvas to the imagination.” — Henry David Thoreau
7.  “So you see, imagination needs moodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.” — Brenda Ueland
8.  “You write your first draft with your heart and you re-write with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think.” — Sean Connery
9. “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” — Walt Disney
10. “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” — John Steinbeck
11.  “Invention strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come from nothing.” — Sir Joshua Reynolds
12.  “Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.” — Albert Einstein
13.  ” Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.” — Erich Fromm
14.  ” Creativity is the quality that you bring to the activity that you are doing. It is an attitude, an inner approach – how you look at things . . . Whatsoever you do, if you do it joyfully, if you do it lovingly, if your act of doing is not purely economical, then it is creative.” – Osho
15. “To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.” –Osho
16. “When you are describing, A shape, or sound, or tint; Don’t state the matter plainly, But put it in a hint; And learn to look at all things, With a sort of mental squint.” –Lewis Carroll
17.  “Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.” — Goethe
18. “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” John Cage
19.  “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” — Joseph Chilton Pierce
20. “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.” — John F. Kennedy
21. “An artist paints, dances, draws, writes, designs, or acts at the expanding edge of consciousness. We press into the unknown rather than the known. This makes life lovely and lively.” — Julia Cameron
22.  “Creative power, is that receptive attitude of expectancy which makes a mold into which the plastic and as yet undifferentiated substance can flow and take the desired form.” — Thomas Troward
23.  “Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.” — George Lois
24. “A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.” — Charles Caleb Colton
25. “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.” — Bertrand Russell