Top 100 quotes to inspire creativity

The following quotes have been hand-picked for this list and may not represent an official "top 100" from any particular source. They are sourced from a range of artists, thinkers, and creators throughout history.

1. "Creativity is intelligence having fun." – Albert Einstein
2. "You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have." – Maya Angelou
3. "Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye." – Dorothy Parker
4. "Every child is an artist, the problem is staying an artist when you grow up." – Pablo Picasso
5. "Have no fear of perfection, you'll never reach it." – Salvador Dali
6. "Creativity takes courage." – Henri Matisse
7. "An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." – Oscar Wilde
8. "Originality is nothing but judicious imitation." – Voltaire
9. "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." – Scott Adams
10. "The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense." – Pablo Picasso
11. "To be creative means to be in love with life." – Osho
12. "Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach." – Charles Mingus
13. "Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!" – Dr. Seuss
14. "The creative adult is the child who survived." – Ursula Leguin
15. "You don’t have to be 'a creative' to be creative." – Drory Ben-Menachem
16. "Creativity is contagious. Pass it on." – Albert Einstein
17. "Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun." – Mary Lou Cook
18. "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge." – Mikhail Bakunin
19. "Everything you can imagine is real." – Pablo Picasso
20. "Art, freedom and creativity will change society faster than politics." – Victor Pinchuk
21. "Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence." – Osho
22. "The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." – Sylvia Plath
23. "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
24. "Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people." – Leo Burnett
25. "The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision." – Neil Gaiman
26. "Every act of creation is first an act of destruction." – Pablo Picasso
27. "Creativity doesn’t wait for that perfect moment. It fashions its own perfect moments out of ordinary ones." – Bruce Garrabrandt
28. "Creativity involves breaking out of expected patterns in order to look at things in a different way." – Edward de Bono
29. "Create with the heart; build with the mind." – Criss Jami
30. "Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected." – William Plomer
31. "Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous." – Bill Moyers
32. "The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul." – Dieter F. Uchtdorf
33. "There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period." – Brené Brown
34. "Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value." – Ken Robinson
35. "The thing about creativity is, people are going to laugh at it. Get over it." – Twyla Tharp
36. "An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail." – Edwin Land
37. "Every artist was first an amateur." – Ralph Waldo Emerson
38. "I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." – John Cage
39. "Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos." – Mary Shelley
40. "True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’." – Arthur Rimbaud
41. "To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong." – Joseph Chilton Pearce
42. "The best way to predict the future is to create it." – Peter Drucker
43. "Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." – Lewis Carroll
44. "Creativity is the way I share my soul with the world." – Brene Brown
45. "Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere." – Carl Sagan
46. "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." – Jack London
47. "A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations." – Gerald G. Jampolsky
48. "Innovation is creativity with a job to do." – John Emmerling
49. "Creativity is the residue of time wasted." – Albert Einstein
50. "Without freedom, there is no creation." – Jiddu Krishnamurti
51. "It's not about breaking the rules. It is about abandoning the concept of rules altogether." – Paul Lemberg
52. "Life is creation - self and circumstances, the raw material." – Dorothy Richardson
53. "The only unique contribution we will ever make in this world will be born of our creativity." – Brene Brown
54. "Do not fear mistakes - there are none." – Miles Davis
55. "We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down." – Kurt Vonnegut
56. "The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper." – Maya Angelou
57. "If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play." – John Cleese
58. "What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul." – Deepak Chopra
59. "Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating." – John Cleese
60. "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
61. "We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are." – Anais Nin
62. "Creativity is a continual surprise." – Ray Bradbury
63. "Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity." – Ray Bradbury
64. "Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen." – John Steinbeck
65. "In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude." – Rollo May
66. "Absurdity and anti—absurdity are the two poles of creative energy." – Karl Lagerfeld
67. "Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time." – Thomas Merton
68. "Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday." – Ray Kroc
69. "Creativity is a drug I cannot live without." – Cecil B. DeMille
70. "Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts." – Rita Mae Brown
71. "The creative process is a process of surrender, not control." – Julia Cameron
72. "Creativity is the power to act." – Ai Weiwei
73. "What is now proved was once only imagined." – William Blake
74. "Creativity arises from our ability to see things from many different angles." – Keri Smith
75. "Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness." – Julia Cameron
76. "The heart and soul of the company is creativity and innovation." – Bob Iger
77. "Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature." – Eric Hoffer
78. "The more you do, the more you can do." – William Hazlitt
79. "Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties." – Erich Fromm
80. "Anxiety is part of creativity, the need to get something out, the need to be rid of something or to get in touch with something within." – David Duchovny
81. "Creativity is the greatest expression of liberty." – Bryant H. McGill
82. "The chief enemy of creativity is good sense." – Pablo Picasso
83. "Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality." – Arthur Koestler
84. "Creativity is breaking out of your comfort zone." – Vince Lombardi
85. "The field of creativity that exists within each individual is freed by moving out of ideas of wrong-doing or right-doing." – Angeles Arrien
86. "It's through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good." – Paula Scher
87. "Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working." – Pablo Picasso
88. "You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty." – Rajneesh
89. "Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change." – Brene Brown
90. "The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything." – George Lois
91. "Creativity requires input, and that's what research is. You're gathering material with which to build." – Gene Luen Yang
92. "Every morning when I wake up, I experience an supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali." – Salvador Dali
93. "Art is either plagiarism or revolution." – Paul Gauguin
94. "What makes you different or weird, that's your strength." – Meryl Streep
95. "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
96. "Creativity itself doesn't care at all about results - the only thing it craves is the process." – Elizabeth Gilbert
97. "The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates." – Oscar Wilde
98. "You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have." – Maya Angelou
99. "The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience." – Emily Dickinson
100. "Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something." – Steve Jobs