Genius And Creativity Quotes & Sayings

President Obama's view of a free economy is to send your money to his friends. My vision for a free enterprise economy is to return entrepreneurship and genius and creativity to the American people! — Mitt Romney

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed. — Charles Baudelaire

In Jung's terms-that we noted previously-the work is the artist's own transference projection, and he knows that consciously and critically. Whatever he does he is stuck with himself, can't get securely outside and beyond himself. He is also stuck with the work of art itself. Like any material achievement it is visible, earthly, impermanent. No matter how great it is, it still pales in some ways next to the transcending majesty of nature; and so it is ambiguous, hardly a solid immortality symbol. In his greatest genius man is still mocked. No matter that historically art and psychosis have had such an intimate relationship, that the road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. The artist and the madman are trapped by their own fabrications; they wallow in their own anality, in their protest that they really are something special in creation. — Ernest Becker

I have never seen genius without a touch of madness ... and vice versa. — Lance Conrad

Because genius is a characteristic of consciousness, genius is also universal. That which is universal is, therefore, theoretically available to every man. The process of creativity and genius are inherent in human consciousness. Inasmuch as every human has within himself the same essence of consciousness, genius is a potential that resides within everyone. It awaits only the right circumstances to express it. — David R. Hawkins

We lived on 82nd Street and the Metropolitan Museum was my short cut to Central Park. I wrote:
"I go into the museum
and look at all the pictures on the walls.
Instead of feeling my own insignificance
I want to go straight home and paint."
A great painting, or symphony, or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of creation behind the universe. This surge of creativity has nothing to do with competition, or degree of talent. When I hear a superb pianist, I can't wait to get to my own piano, and I play about as well now as I did when I was ten. A great novel, rather than discouraging me, simply makes me want to write. This response on the part of any artist is the need to make incarnate the new awareness we have been granted through the genius of someone else. — Madeleine L'Engle

The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world ofits own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited. — Walter Pater

Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains. — Henri Bergson

At first the creative mind submits to its entry into the symbolic register and gets itself structured like everyone else. Then he balks at a fateful moment which becomes a turning point in the history of his mental growth. From the entry into the imaginary order where he acknowledges his ego and then to the symbolic order where he recognizes his place in the society and finally in his de-symbolization or a refusal to obey the Law that is the rules of the world of symbols, a creative genius is born. — Anuradha Bhattacharyya

Every creative genius has been a channel. Every masterwork has been created through the channeling process. Great works are not created by the personality alone. They arise from a deep inspiration on the universal level, and are then expressed and brought into form through the individual personality. — Shakti Gawain

Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized further adventures Virgil decided to chronicle. Shakespeare didn't invent Hamlet and King Lear; he plucked them from historical and literary sources. Writers weren't the originators of the stories they told; they were just the temporary curators of them. Real creation was something the gods did.
All that has changed. Today the way we think of creativity is dominated by Romantic notions of individual genius and originality, and late-capitalist concepts of intellectual property, under which artists are businesspeople whose creations are the commodities they have for sale. — Lev Grossman

I often joke with my audiences that I make most of my income on a ski pole. People smile but they get my point. You need to make time for your genius to flow. We get our creative bursts, those idea torrents that take our business and personal lives to the next level, while we are skiing or drinking coffee in a Starbucks or walking in the woods or meditation with a sunrise. Those pursuits are not a waste of time. Creativity comes when you are relaxed, happy and enjoying the moment. And when it comes, it brings ideas that rock your world. — Robin Sharma

Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest. — Mike Norton

Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them. — William Shakespeare

It's a silly argument, and unnecessary. Creativity doesn't happen "in here" or "out there" but in the spaces in between. Creativity is a relationship, one that unfolds at the intersection of person and place. — Eric Weiner

A genius masters the art of observation, and unites with the source of imagination to create advancements in the cause for human evolution. — T.F. Hodge

The qualities of creativity and genius are within you, awaiting your decision to match up with the power of intention. — Wayne Dyer

Fashion is ephemeral, dangerous and unfair. — Karl Lagerfeld

A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh. — Stephen King

Creativity runs across many categories in life, from the arts-and-crafts project a mum or dad does with their kids, to the bestselling author's manuscript, to the designs of the hairdresser, to the creations of the computer programming genius. — Tabatha Coffey

Genius creates from the heart and when the artifact is broken so is the heart. — Elizabeth Goudge

The real importance of automatism lay in the fact that it led to a different relation between the artist and the creative act. Where the artist had traditionally been seen as someone who invents a personal world, bringing into being something unique to his own 'genius', the surrealists conceived themselves as explorers and researchers rather than 'artist' in the traditional sense and it was discovery rather than invention that became crucial for them. — Michael Richardson

In my view, ideas and other intellectual productions are more interesting, more indicative of intelligence, and more productively debated than IQ alone. — Christopher Langan

I consider Otto Rank to be one of the great spiritual giants of the twentieth century, a genius as a psychologist and a saint as a human being. Though vilified by his original community of Freudians, he never became bitter. He died a feminist and deeply committed to social justice, in 1939 ... His deep understanding of creativity makes him a mentor for all of us living in a postmodern world ... I believe that Art and Artist, especially chapters 12 to 14, may well emerge as the most valuable psychoanalysis of the spiritual life in our time. — Matthew Fox

We can never be entirely original, as artists or as people. The genius and vision of those who came before us is too great for us to digress from entirely. Though, as creatures that are compelled to test and surpass our own creative abilities, we must always strive for that originality in everything we do in order to move the world forward. — Jessica Lave

I can't overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I'd thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the apex of human existence, and that to work at an ordinary office job was a betrayal of that life, and I had to pursue that life at all costs. Management consulting, law school, med school, those were fine for other people - I didn't judge! - but I was an artist. I was super special. I was sparkly. I would walk another path.
And I would walk it alone. That was another thing I knew about being an artist: You didn't need other people. Other people were a distraction. My little chrysalis of genius was going to seat one and one only. — Lev Grossman

The genius craves inspiration: she craves altered states and fresh perceptions. She will have them either through evolving closer to the divine or through devolving lower into the world. This is how some people with great genius come to die of drug and alcohol addiction: they seek inspiration by intoxication and are thereby ruined. — Carolyn Elliott

That manic depression, far from being a liability was an advantage. It was a selected trait. If it wasn't selected for, then the "disorder" would have disappeared long ago, bred out of the population like anything else that didn't increase the odds of survival. The advantage was obvious. The advantage was the energy, the creativity, the feeling of genius, almost, that Leonard felt right now. There was no telling how many great historical figures had been manic-depressives, how many scientific and artistic breakthroughs had occurred to people during manic episodes. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness often appear to be the same thing. They both have a tendency to blur the lines of what we call norms, or established reality. They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures.
from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius — Aberjhani

To most observers, innovation is a solitary process that requires creativity and genius, perhaps even greatness. It can't, in their view, be managed or predicted, just hoped for and, perhaps, facilitated. But for me innovation was and still is more than that. It was a battle in the marketplace between innovators or attackers trying to make money by changing the order of things, and defenders protecting their cash flow. — Richard J. Foster

The word creativity is closely linked to the word genius, since both words have the root meaning 'to give birth.' Essentially, creativity designates the capacity to give birth to new ways of looking at things, the ability to make novel connections between disparate things, and the knack for seeing things that might be missed by the typical way of viewing life. — Thomas Armstrong

Einstein's secretary once said that if Einstein were born among the polar bears, he would still be Einstein. But unless polar bears were well versed in theoretical physics, that is not true. Einstein would not be Einstein. Which is not to take anything away from Einstein, or the polar bears, but simply to point out that he was part of a creative ecology, and trying to isolate him from it is not only silly but futile. — Eric Weiner

The genius inside a person wants activity. It's connected to the stars; it's connected to a spark and it wants to burn and it wants to make and it wants to create and it has gifts to give. That is the nature of inner genius. — Michael Meade

Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with. — Umberto Eco

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him ... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create
so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating. — Pearl S. Buck

The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilising of it. No human soul can long ignore "the giant agony of the world" and live, except indeed the mollusc life, a barnacle upon eternity. — Helen Waddell

The Ancient Romans did not regard acts of genius to emanate from within an individual - but rather saw it as a collaboration between a spirit of creativity and a human being. So it could be that sometimes an individual had that power, that divine inspiration, or other times not. The spirit might have moved on to some other lucky soul. — Liz Garbus

Rather than being medicalized or romanticized, mental disorders, or mental dis-eases, should be understood as nothing less or more than what they are, an expression of our deepest human nature. By recognizing their traits in ourselves and reflecting upon them, we may be able both to contain them and to put them to good use. This is, no doubt, the highest form of genius. — Neel Burton

At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls. — Aberjhani

The transformation of the impossible into reality is always the mark of a demonic will. The only way to recognize a military genius is by the fact that, during the war, he will mock the rules of warfare and will employ creative improvisation instead of tested methods and he will do so at the right moment. — Stefan Zweig

As in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthy rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in one's soul for the fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first brought to light. — Herman Melville

The romance that has surrounded the Beat generation since the mid-Sixties has acted as a kind of sentimental glaze, obscuring its fundamentally nihilistic impulse under a heap of bogus rhetoric about liberation, spontaneity, and 'startling oases of creativity', Notwithstanding their recent media media make-over, the Beats were not Promethean iconoclasts. They were drug-abusing sexual predators and infantilized narcissists whose shamelessness helped dupe a confused and gullible public into believing that their utterances were works of genius. We have to thank Lisa Phillips and the Whitney for inadvertently reminding us of this with such vividness. If nothing else, 'Beat Culture and the New America' showed that the Beats were not simply artistic charlatans; the were -- and, in the case of those who are still with us, they remain -- moral simpletons, whose destructive influence helped fuel the cultural catastrophe with which we are now living. — Roger Kimball

There are 2 kinds of artists, essentially: those who want to make something popular, and those who want to make something dignified. But then there is still that rare hybrid case, and perhaps by that unintentional stroke of genius, in which one's work uncontrollably becomes both popular and dignified yet beyond its time. — Criss Jami

It is in everyone's interest that every person's creative genius be encouraged and allowed to develop and express. — Efiong Etuk

I know that a lot of our successes came because we had pure intentions and great talent, and we did a lot of things right, but I also believe that attributing our successes solely to our own intelligence, without acknowledging the role of accidental events, diminishes us. We must acknowledge the random events that went our way, because acknowledging our good fortune - and not telling ourselves that everything we did was some stroke of genius - lets us make more realistic assessments and decisions. The existence of luck also reminds us that our activities are less repeatable. Since change is inevitable, the question is: Do you act to stop it and try to protect yourself from it, or do you become the master of change by accepting it and being open to it? My view, of course, is that working with change is what creativity is about. — Ed Catmull

The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command.
... I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me." And the artist either says, "My soul doth magnify the Lord," and willingly becomes the bearer of teh work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.
As for Mary, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child's creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss. — Madeleine L'Engle

Apophenia means finding pattern or meaning where others don't. Feelings of revelation and ecstasies usually accompany it. It has some negative connotations in psychological terminology when it implies finding meaning or pattern where none exists; and some positive ones when it implies finding something important, useful or beautiful. It thus links creativity and psychosis, genius and madness. — Peter J. Carroll

There's an old saying, "We can mess it up and God cleans it up." I haven't noticed a deity of any sort cleaning up our messes. We're going to have to do it ourselves, particularly since we have created most of these problems just by the genius and creativity that we've expressed and experienced here in this modern period. We've done it, and we've got to straighten it out. — Edgar Mitchell

Like almost all of Beefheart's recorded work, [Trout Mask Replica] was not even "ahead" of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one. — Lester Bangs

The spark of a genius exists in the brain of the truly creative man from the hour of his birth. True genius is always inborn and never cultivated, let alone learned. — Adolf Hitler

The knowledge of the Spirit is the true secret of creativity, leadership and happiness. It is spiritual intelligence that makes an ordinary person a genius. When a genius loses his spiritual intelligence, he becomes quite ordinary. — Awdhesh Singh

The role of your genius spirit is to essentially heal, transform, and evolve consciousness. — Carolyn Elliott