Creativity is a powerful force — a dynamic spark that drives innovation and progress.
It’s not just about creating art or producing novel ideas — it’s about envisioning new solutions to old problems, thinking outside the box, and daring to dream of a better future.
Whether it's an artist using their work to shed light on societal issues, a scientist thinking creatively to address environmental challenges, or a community leader innovating ways to uplift their neighborhood — creativity is at the heart of making a positive difference.
In fact, some of the world's most significant advancements and impactful initiatives have come from those who dared to think creatively — innovators, artists, and thinkers.
And we’ve gathered their words of wisdom here today.
Their insights illustrate the importance of creativity in forging a path towards a brighter, more just world.
These quotes will inspire you to unleash your own creativity and imagine new possibilities for a better future.
Whether you’re an artist, a problem solver, or anyone seeking inspiration to think more creatively, these quotes will light the spark within you. Dive in and let these powerful words fuel your creative spirit:
Best Quotes About Creativity
Famous Quotes
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use the more you have.”
— Maya Angelou
“Creativity is the language we use to communicate the urgency of our dreams for a better future.”
— Audre Lorde
“Our dreams may seem impossible, but our creativity can turn them into reality.”
— Malala Yousafzai
“The most creative people are motivated by the grandest of problems that are presented before them.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
“Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.”
— Virginia Woolf
“The power of our dreams and the creativity we employ can break the chains of injustice and oppression.”
— Desmond Tutu
“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.”
— Mary Lou Cook
“The creative adult is the child who survived.”
— Ursula Le Guin
“Creativity is the heartbeat of activism, and dreams are the fuel that drives our determination.”
— Jamie Margolin
“The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense.”
— Pablo Picasso
“True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse.’”
— Arthur Rimbaud
“Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.”
— Max Ernst
Inspirational Quotes
“Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while working.”
— Henri Matisse
“Creativity is our most powerful tool to shape the world we want to live in.”
— Isra Hirsi
“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.”
— Neil Gaiman
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
— Ira Glass
“The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, the world needs dreamers who do.”
— Sarah Ban Breathnach
“Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.”
— Maya Angelou
“Dreams are the seeds of change. Nothing ever grows without a seed, and nothing ever changes without a dream.”
— Debby Boone
“Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
“Our dreams and creativity can rewrite the narratives of our future.”
— Mari Copeny
“A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert
“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, The Little Prince
“I believe that the most important single thing, beyond discipline and creativity is daring to dare.”
— Maya Angelou
“Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.”
— Rita Mae Brown
On Imagination
“That’s what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.”
— Walt Disney
“Everything you can imagine is real.”
— Pablo Picasso
“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
“Imagination is the source of all human achievement.”
— Sir Ken Robinson
“Creativity begins to die when we fail to celebrate curiosity.
We reward students for getting the right answer, but not for asking good questions. We promote managers for delivering results, but not for developing new ideas.
Encouraging imagination is the mother of invention.”
— Adam Grant
“Creativity fuels our imagination, and our imagination fuels our dreams of a better world.”
— Greta Thunberg
On Art
“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”
— Toni Cade Bambara
“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
“The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”
— James Baldwin
“Art is where what we survive survives.”
— John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed
“You cannot teach creativity — how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.”
— Mario Vargas Llosa
“The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it. He hopes to impose his particular vision and share it with others. And when the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.”
— Anaïs Nin
“Art helps us envision a world in which all of our goals for society are right before us. Use your creativity to bolster and expand your attention. You’re in it for the long haul.”
— Imani Barbarin
“We need musicians and storytellers to bring healing to our culture, and we need that now, more than ever.”
— Chloé S. Valdary
“Some of [my memoir] — perhaps too much — has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it — and perhaps the best of it — is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.”
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Art isn’t optional for humans.”
— John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed
“Art is a group of highly sensitive people reporting back what reality is like for them.”
— Pete Holmes
“The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.”
— Dieter F. Uchtdorf
On Innovation
“You can be creative in anything — in math, science, engineering, philosophy — as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.”
— Sir Ken Robinson
“Your brain gets too comfortable in your everyday surroundings. You need to make it uncomfortable. You need to spend some time in another land, among people that do things differently than you. Travel makes the world look new, and when the world looks new, our brains work harder.”
— Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.”
— Mary Shelley
“There is no innovation and creativity without failure.”
— Brené Brown
“Dreams are the starting point of every revolution, and creativity fuels its fire.”
— Gloria Steinem
“You are never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true.”
— Richard Bach
“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.”
— Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
Short Creativity Quotes
“Creativity takes courage.”
— Henri Matisse
“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”
— George Scialabbe
“Creativity is the way I share my soul with the world.”
— Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
— C.S. Lewis
“Dreaming without action is merely a fantasy. Channel your creativity into real change.”
— Jamie Margolin
“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
— Sylvia Plath
“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
— Gustave Flaubert
“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”
— Oprah Winfrey
“Creativity involves breaking out of expected patterns in order to look at things in a different way.”
— Edward de Bono
“You can’t schedule creativity, it just happens.”
— Brittany Cabriales
“The dreamers are the saviors of the world.”
— James Allen
“Our dreams are the canvas, and our creativity is the paint that brings them to life.”
— Xiuhtezcatl Martinez
On Creating
“Take your broken heart, make it into art.”
— Carrie Fisher
“People who live in fear of others stealing their ideas generally don’t have many good ideas.
Creativity is abundant. Execution is scarce.
What prevails is not the best idea but the best implementation.”
— Adam Grant
“Creativity doesn’t wait for that perfect moment. It fashions its own perfect moments out of ordinary ones.”
— Bruce Garrabrandt
“Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb. They want the job title without the work. If you pick the wrong noun to aspire to, you’ll be stuck with the wrong verb, too. When people use the word creative” as a job title, it not only falsely divides the world into ‘creatives’ and ‘non-creatives,’ but also implies that the work of a ‘creative’ is ‘being creative.’ But being creative is never an end; it is a means to something else. Creativity is just a tool.”
— Austin Kleon, in a blog post
“Establish a daily practice and use it as a way of getting through your days. Sometimes creative work really is just going through the motions. You don’t necessarily need a vision. Stick to your practice, and things will appear. There’s a Sex Pistols song with the lyric, ‘Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it.’ That’s where I am. I don’t have a grand vision for the future… but I have a practice, and I am curious to see what turns up, and that’s why I get up in the morning.”
— Austin Kleon, in a blog post
“Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.”
— Salvador Dali
On Being Creative
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
“I dream in fire but work in clay.”
— Arthur Machen
“Overthinking the process will kill any career in the creative space. You just have to do, not think.”
— Casey Neistat
“My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life.”
— Miles Davis
On Rest
“Sometimes the creativity is in the rest.”
— Joshua Kissi
“Resting is not a waste of time. It’s an investment in well-being.
Relaxing is not a sign of laziness. It’s a source of energy.
Breaks are not a distraction. They’re a chance to refocus attention.
Play is not a frivolous activity. It’s a path to connection and creativity.”
— Adam Grant
“Rest nurtures creativity, which nurtures activity. Activity nurtures rest, which sustains creativity. Each draws from and contributes to the other.”
— Kim John Payne
More Quotes
“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.”
— Sophia Loren
“Creativity is problem-solving.
Creativity is progress.
Creativity is a tool. Harness yours.”
— Alex Lieberman
“I’ve been having a long debate with myself about whether human creativity can exist absent problems to solve. I don’t think it can. Even if the problems are self-imposed (which they often are, at least in the beginning of the process) I think all creativity is problem solving.”
— Hank Green
“In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.”
— Anaïs Nin
“The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.”
— Bruce Lee
“Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. I get some of my best ideas when I’m bored, which is why I never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts-it’s so boring, I almost always get good ideas. If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maira Kalman says, ‘Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.’”
— Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
“But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.”
— Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
