"To understand is to invent." Piaget

"Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual." Arthur Koestler, novelist and journalist (1905-1983)

"If you have anything really valuable to contribute to the world it will come through the expression of your own personality, that single spark of divinity that sets you off and makes you different from every other living creature." Bruce Barton

"The eye of the master will do more work than both his hands." Benjamin Franklin

"The things we fear most in organizations--fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances--are the primary sources of creativity." Margaret J. Wheatley

"If I create from the heart, nearly everything works, if from the head almost nothing." Marc Chagall

"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, portrait photographer

"I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden." John Erskine

"Good art is not what it looks like, but what it does to us." Roy Adzak

"Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas." Elizabeth Murray

"If you make music for the human needs you have within yourself, then you do it for all humans who need the same things. You enrich humanity with the profound expression of these feelings." Billy Joel

"Working with metaphor involves the skill of transforming one thing into another that is more valuable. Metaphors are intimately connected to the concept of transformation; in ancient Greek, the word metaphor means a transformer. Children naturally transform so many things they encounter around them. With imaginative boldness, the turn bed pillows into mountains, a cardboard box into a ship, and a blanket into an ocean to sail across. Like children, we need to use the power of metaphor to touch the inner truths of the images we create, because metaphor is the authentic reflection of artistic creativity. Like art, it is dynamic, has not strict rules about meaning, and is by nature fluid and flexible." Cathy Malchiodi

"The key that unlocks energy is desire. It's also the key to a long and interesting life. If we expect to create any drive, any real force within ourselves, we have to get excited." Earl Nightengale

"An ordinary artist shows you the things everybody can see. The egotistical artist shows you the things only he can see. But the great artist shows you things nobody ever saw before." Pablo Picasso

"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." Thomas A. Edison

"The primary benefit of practicing art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow." Kurt Vonnegut

"Music is purposeless play, an affirmation of life, not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living." John Cage

"Invention requires an excited mind; execution, a calm one." Johann Peter Eckermann, poet (1792-1854)

"Where there is rhythm, there is grace.Where there is grace, there is efficiency." Christopher Bergland

"Creativity is the ability to move from one failure to another with no loss of Enthusiasm." Winston Churchill

"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity." Charles Mingus

"Our true illiteracy is our inability to create." Friedensreich Hundertwasser

"A lotta cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the original." Louis Armstrong

"I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once." John Coltrane

"Genius is the error in the system." Paul Klee

"To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted" George Kneller

"Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads." Marianne Moore

"The supreme art of the teacher is to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." Albert Einstein

"Creative work is a natural flow-inducer that helps us to shut out the chaos, focus our energies, and experience exhilaration." Cathy Malchiodi

"Creativity exists more in the searching than in the finding." Stephen Nachmanovich

"One of the things we admire most in fiction is an ending that is surprising, yet inevitable. This is also what characterizes elegance in design: the invention that's clever, yet seems totally natural." Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” George Bernard Shaw

“The creative person is willing to live with ambiguity. He doesn't need problems solved immediately and can afford to wait for the right ideas.” Abe Tannenbaum

"The things we fear most in organizations--fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances--are the primary sources of creativity." Margaret J. Wheatley

"The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation." Igor Stravinsky

“Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent and independent with a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play.” Henri Matisse

"The anthropologist is an art historian. Humanity's footprints were left by the creators not by the bureaucrats. In looking at history, we are looking at art. To understand a culture we look at what they created." Ruth Vaughan

“No matter how old you get, if you can keep the desire to be creative, you’re keeping the man-child alive.” John Cassavetes

“At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity.” Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, author of Kitchen Table Wisdom

“Imagination and its offspring, creativity and innovation, may not be tangible assets like oil or gold. They cannot be bought or sold. They belong to everyone and are essential to what it is to be human. They can be nourished or depleted. They can be renewed or dissipated. The most abundant, least expensive, most underutilized, and frequently abused resource in the world today is human ingenuity.” Dawna Markova, Smart Parenting Revolution

“During those rare moments of creativeness, when an ordinary person has something in common with the making of the universe, he feels a sense of transcendence, of moving beyond his daily life. What could be a greater reward?” Joseph Zinker

“It is possible that scientists, poets, painters [artists] and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call common-place and to ‘re-present’ them to us (the world) in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded.” Gary Zukav "The Dancing Wu Li Masters"

“As I write this, for example, I am sitting comfortably in my rose garden and typing on my new computer. Each rose represents a story, so I'm never at a loss for what to type. I just look deep into the heart of the rose, read its story, and then write it down.” Steve Martin

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.” Charlie Mingus

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

“Great photographs have the power to inform by presenting in isolation and with clarity that which is lost in the web of familiarity. They can expand our consciousness by showing us things we have never seen, closed our eyes to, or forgot to notice.” Carol Ehlers, Curator, LaSalle Bank Photography Collection

“Age gives you the freedom to do some things you've never done before. Great work can come at any stage of your life.” Will Barnet

“In creating, the only hard thing's to begin; A grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.” James Russell Lowell

“When freedom prevails, the ingenuity and inventiveness of people creates incredible wealth. This is the source of the natural improvement of the human condition.” Brian S. Wesbury, American Economist

“I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning . . . Every day I find something creative to do with my life. I'll play it first and tell you what it is later. Bebop was about change, about evolution. It wasn't about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change. A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it.” Miles Davis

“The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.” Pablo Casals, cellist, conductor, and composer (1876-1973)

“I never came upon any of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking.” Albert Einstein

“The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent or absorbing positive knowledge.” Albert Einstein

“The world of reality has its limits, the world of imagination is boundless.” Jean Jacques Rousseau

“Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training.” Anonymous

“I can look at a fine photograph and sometimes I can hear music” Ansel Adams

“Questions are the creative acts of intelligence.” Frank Dingdon

“There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.” G. K. Chesterton

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

“Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.” Rollo May

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

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” Nietzsche

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” C.G. Jung

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple, learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” John Steinbeck

“If you want to think outside the box, be outside the box.” David Levin

“There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.” Edward de Bono

“If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.” John Cleese, comic actor (1939- )

“Expressing your creativity is done more by the way you are living than by any other gesture.” Douglas Pagels

“When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.” John Ruskin

“The ability to relate and to connect, sometimes in odd and yet striking fashion, lies at the very heart of any creative use of the mind, no mattter in what field or discipline.” George J. Seidel

“Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

“If the result of something I do is that someone feels 10% less crazy because they see someone else thinking what they're thinking, then I provide a service.” Albert Brooks

“Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by orginality, overcomes everything.” George Lois

“I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life.” Miles Davis

“The greatest masterpieces were once only pigments on a palette.” Henry S. Hoskins

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Albert Einstein

“[The artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear…which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.” Joseph Conrad

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Thomas Paine

“A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.” unknown

“The man who has no imagination has no wings.” Muhammad Ali

“Imagination is intelligence having fun.” unknown

“I look for what needs to be done.... After all, that's how the universe designs itself.” R. Buckminster Fuller, engineer, designer, and architect (1895-1983)

“Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same.” Gunter Grass

“One must have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star.” Nietzsche

“If you have a talent, use it in every which way possible. Don't hoard it. Don't dole it out like a miser. Spend it lavishly like a millionaire intent on going broke.” Brendan Francis

“You can't depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus.” Mark Twain

“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” Carl Sagan

“I saw the angel in the marble and I just chiseled till I set him free.” Michelangelo