One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
The key question isn't "What fosters creativity?" But it is why in God's name isn't everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.
The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.
You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.
I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.
Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.
It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.
Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
Eveyone is a genius at least once a year. A real genius has his original ideas closer together.
The world is but a canvas to the imagination.
Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way to create.
The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.
The things we fear most in organizations -- fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances -- are the primary sources of creativity.
There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
The moment when you first wake up in the morning is the most wonderful of the twenty-four hours. No matter how weary or dreary you may feel, you possess the certainty that, during the day that lies before you, absolutely anything may happen. And the fact that it practically always doesn't, matters not a jot. The possibility is always there.
Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.
You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.
There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works ... images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models -- surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works -- promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.
A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely . . . but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude . . .
Life is "trying things to see if they work."
Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.
Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.
Spirituality exists wherever we struggle with the issue of how our lives fit into the greater cosmic scheme of things. This is true even when our questions never give way to specific answers or give rise to specific practices such as prayer or meditation. We encounter spiritual issues every time we wonder where the universe comes from, why we are here, or what happens when we die. We also become spiritual when we become moved by values such as beauty, love, or creativity that seem to reveal a meaning or power beyond our visible world. An idea or practice is "spiritual" when it reveals our personal desire to establish a felt-relationship with the deepest meanings or powers governing life.
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.
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
Injustice can be eliminated, but human conflicts and natural limitations cannot be removed. The conflicts of social life and the limitations of nature cannot be controlled or transcended. They can, however, be endured and survived. It is possible for there to be a dance with life, a creative response to its intrinsic limits and challenges ... [A Feminist Ethic of Risk]
A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
[C]reative ability and personal responsibility are strongest when the mind is free from supernatural belief and operates in an atmosphere of freedom and democracy.
I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.
If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?
Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.
Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
