Quotes & Sayings About Originality And Creativity

To prepare youth for success in entrepreneurial (and free) cultures, education tends to emphasize originality, creativity, breadth, depth and leadership skills rather than rote memorization, standardized curricula or socialization. The latter skill set is vital in societies with strong upper classes employing the lower castes, but the former is essential to free democratic nations. — Oliver DeMille

When most of the greatest individuals in history were misunderstood and you've spent so much of your own adult life misunderstood, you can't help but believe that the majority of people know very little worth knowing. — Criss Jami

Detach the writer from the milieu where he has experienced his greatest sense of belonging, and you have created a discontinuity within his personality, a short circuit in his identity. The result is his originality, his creativity comes to an end. He becomes the one-book novelist or the one-trilogy writer. — Henry Roth

An invitation to innovation, Radiant Orchid encourages expanded creativity and originality, which is increasingly valued in today's society. — Leatrice Eiseman

There is nothing higher-class than real craftsmanship, diversity, originality and the service of skilled human hands. — Bryant McGill

If you walk along the street you will encounter a number of scientific problems. Of these, about 80 per cent are insoluble, while 19½ per cent are trivial. There is then perhaps half a per cent where skill, persistence, courage, creativity and originality can make a difference. It is always the task of the academic to swim in that half a per cent, asking the questions through which some progress can be made. — Hermann Bondi

Originality of mind untainted,
And enthusiasm for life, unlimited. — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

What tender and devoted mother wouldn't be dismayed and ill with terror at her son's or daughter's stepping even one hair's breath off the beaten track. No, better let him be happy and live in comfort without originality, is what every mother thinks when she rocks the cradle. The only person among us who can fail to reach the general's rank is the original man - in other words, the man who won't be quiet. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

The general advertisers and their agencies know almost nothing for sure, because they cannot measure the results of their advertising. They worship at the altar of creativity, which really means 'originality': The most dangerous word in the lexicon of advertising — David Ogilvy

Think outside the box? Indeed. But to add balance to that, one should not in the process forget what the inside of the box looks like as well. Those who are best at thinking outside the box do it not to puff themselves up, but to see how small they really are. As a contented fish in its fish tank appears to have a small, boring existence to us, imagine a larger, more perceptive kingdom (even by scientific taxonomy) to whom our contented existences may appear to be small and boring. This is where true creativity and massive perceptive abilities spawn a sense of intellectual humility; the kind which God adores. — Criss Jami

The human spirit's unquenchable drive for originality and compulsion for creating art is the compelling force of our humanity. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Absurdity and anti - absurdity are the two poles of creative energy. — Karl Lagerfeld

Every man has a specific skill, whether it is discovered or not, that more readily and naturally comes to him than it would to another, and his own should be sought and polished. He excels best in his niche - originality loses its authenticity in one's efforts to obtain originality. — Criss Jami

Creativity is not simply originality and unlimited freedom. There is much more to it than that. Creativity also imposes restrictions. While it uses methods other than those of ordinary thinking, it must not be in disagreement with ordinary thinking-or rather, it must be something that, sooner or later, ordinary thinking will understand, accept, and appreciate. Otherwise the result would be bizarre, not creative. — Silvano Arieti

It is not commercial success but originality and proof of autonomy which are admired. — Angela Phillips

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

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

Time and time over it is the ones who try a little too hard to be innovative rebels - and for the sheer glory of being considered innovative rebels - who then turn out not quite as innovative or as rebellious as they would like to think they are. — Criss Jami

Creativity starts with a little touch of insanity and culminates with the highest trust on its beauty, but throughout it maintains the hands of originality,humanity and ALMIGHTY. — Anuj

Perfectionism is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If — Augusten Burroughs

Just keep thinking about the good side of ADD - the creativity and the originality it can stimulate. — David Neeleman

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

It is not possible to be original by trying to be original - those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse to intense and overwhelming that it bursts the conventions and produces something new - again more by accident than design. — Michael Foley

With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. Connoissers admire the "skill" (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the "quality of painting" (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away. The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures "nice" or "splendid." Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing. — Wassily Kandinsky

Creativity, which is the expression of our originality, helps us stay mindful that what we bring to the world is completely original and cannot be compared. — Brene Brown

Insanity is coasting through life in a miserable existence when you have a caged lion locked inside and the key to release it. — Morgan Freeman

If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left. — Quentin Crisp

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.
[Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999] — Anna Quindlen

Originality brings more bumps in the road, yet it leaves us with more happiness and a greater sense of meaning. — Adam Grant

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
[MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ] — Jim Jarmusch

To be an artist and to be recognized by another artist who is, you know, just something you can't even put into words, someone that is so far beyond what the normal human being experience is in terms of creativity and originality. That was kind of a moment where I thought wow maybe I do have something more that makes me special. — Misty Copeland

Small business people have gotten us out of nearly all modern recessions - not by waiting for others to fix things or turning to government, but rather by applying leadership, inventiveness, creativity and originality. — Oliver DeMille

After some time passed in studying - and even imitating - the works of others, I would recommend the student to endeavour to be original, and to remember that originality should not be undiscovered plagiarism. — Henry Peach Robinson

Originality has nothing to do with producing something ' new' - it is about seeking the source, the primordial ground from which you draw and have always drawn your being. It comes about when one works from one's origins, it is the dance of the eternal return ... and is as ancient as the Dreamtime. — Billy Marshall Stoneking

Perfection is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If you are a perfectionist, at least stop telling everybody you're one and try to get over it yourself, alone in your home with the lights off — Augusten Burroughs

Creativity is the ability to produce ideas that are both original and valuable. — Gerard Puccio

Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our integrity and awareness, the more original and creative our time will become. — John O'Donohue

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