Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia
Britannica.
— Stephen Leacock
There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.
— Thomas Edison
What it all gets down to is price paying. If you want to become more
creative, you have to be willing to put forth the effort necessary to do the things that lead to increased
creativity.
— Robert J. Ringer writing about
Creativity
Is there a spiritual element to creativity?
Hell, yes. Our mightiest ally (our indispensable ally)
is belief in something we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or feel.
— Steven Pressfield
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day,
something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is
bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
— Christopher Morley
Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.
— Dr. E. Land (inventor of the Polaroid Camera)
Why do we admire the true achievers and innovators
of this world such as Steve Jobs? Because they appeal to our
own creative souls, to our own desire to make a difference for humanity and to leave the Universe a better
place when we depart than it was when we got here.
— from Life's Secret Handbook (Reminders for Adventurous Souls Who Want to Make a Big Difference
in This World)
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that
other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.
— Henry David Thoreau
You are always alone as a creator.
— Arkadi Kuhlman, Founder of Ing Direct
Everything has been thought of before,
but the problem is to think of it again.
— Johann W. von Goethe
The Originality
Paradox:
"There are a billion people trying to do something important for the first time. These people are connected
by the net, posting, creating, daring to leap first.
It's hard, because the number of people racing with you to be original is huge.
The numbers are so daunting that the chances that you will create something that resonates, spreads and
changes the culture are really close to zero.
But it's also certain that someone will. In fact, there's a 100% chance that someone will step up with an
action or a concept so daring that it resonates with us.
Nearly zero and certain. At the same time.
Pick your odds, decide what you care about and act accordingly."
— Seth Godin
Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people
don't recognize them.
— Ann Landers
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt.
He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would have been enough.
— Albert Einstein
Ideas in business are a dime
a dozen and if you don't do anything with them, they aren't worth a plugged nickel.
— Author Unknown
To be highly creative, experience prosperity-consciousness, and work toward
financial independence, you must be able to sit back, ponder the big picture, and take the long-term
view. Certain conditions and attitudes tend, more than others, to support the generation of new and
blockbuster money-making ideas. The best environment for generating a bigger cash flow over the long
term, while also preparing for financial independence, is a relaxed one with few
distractions.
—
from The Joy of
Not Working by Ernie Zelinski
Your security is not your job, or your bank account, or your
investments, or your spouse or your parents. Your security is your ability to connect with the cosmic power
that creates all things.
— Louise L. Hay
Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity.
— Michael Porter
Creativity is not knowing it all.
— Ernie Zelinski
The real source of wealth and capital in this new era is
not material things . . . it is the human mind, the human spirit, the human imagination, and our faith
in the future.
— Steve Forbes
True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to
problems are found.
— Eckhart Tolle
Creativity is your most valuable asset and your best
security.
Thus, ensure that you condition your mind more often than you condition your car. Unless, of course, you
value your car more than your mind — then stick with the car.
— from Life's Secret Handbook
Excessive worry not only hinders creativity; it stifles our
goals, hopes, desires, dreams, and prosperity. Worrying about problems is like looking at your nasty
neighbors through high-power binoculars. The problems don’t disappear; they end up appearing a lot larger —
and much nastier — than they really are.
— from 101 Really Important Things You Already Know, But Keep
Forgetting by Ernie Zelinski
You can judge your age by the amount of pain you
feel when you come in contact with a new idea.
— Unknown wise person
A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats
phrases and thinks in a groove.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
Books work as an art form (and an economic one) because they are primarily
the work of an individual.
— Seth Godin
Use your brain. It's the little things that count.
— Graffiti
One of your most powerful inner resources is your own creativity. Be willing to try
on something new and play the game full-out.
— Marcia Wieder
What Is Your WOW Factor?
This applies to both the service
that you provide to the world
and the way you market it.
Make it edgy, make it snappy,
and make it punchy.
Even make it raunchy — but
make it different!
Real different!
— from Life's Secret Handbook (Reminders for Adventurous Souls Who Want to Make a
Big Difference in This World) by Ernie J. Zelinski
Spend your time and energy creating, not criticizing.
— H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
No one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success or “get rich” in business by being a
conformist.
— J. Paul Getty
Being creative in retirement is being
able to spend time without spending money.
— Author Unknown
If you follow the crowd, you will likely get no further than the
crowd. If you walk alone, you're likely to end up in places no one has ever been before. Being an achiever
is not without its difficulties, for peculiarity breeds contempt. The unfortunate thing about being ahead
of your time is that when people finally realize you were right, they'll simply say it was obvious to
everyone all along. You have two choices in life. You can dissolve into the main stream, or you can choose
to become an achiever and be distinct. To be distinct, you must be different. To be different, you must
strive to be what no else but you can be.
— Unknown wise person
Formal education will make you a
living; self-education will make you a fortune.
— Jim Rohn
It's not enough to be the best at what you do. You must be perceived as
the only one who does what you do.
— Jerry Garcia
When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for
creation.
— Margaret Sackville
Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is
beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as
well with pizza.
— Dave Barry
The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented
the other three, he was a genius.
— Sid Caesar
Creativity is reading inspirational quotations about retirement at
work so that I don't have to think about committing suicide.
— Dave Erhard
Keep a note pad and pencil on your bedside table. Million-dollar ideas
sometimes strike at 3 A.M.
— H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
Every child is an artist. The problem
is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
— Pablo Picasso
Making the simple complex doesn't take ingenuity.
Making the complex simple, now, that's ingenuity!
— from Life's Secret Handbook by Ernie
Zelinski
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange
protein; it rejects it.
— P. B. Medawar
RULE 1: Break every company rule except this one if you want to be creative. RULE 2:
Ignore Rule 1 if you want to continue working
here.
— Workplace graffiti
Creativity is coming up with an idea; innovation is getting off your butt
and doing something about it.
— Unknown wise person
The difference between a top-flight creative man and the hack is his ability to express powerful
meanings indirectly.
—Vance Packard
Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.
— Horace
To be yourself in a world that is doing its best, day and night to make
you like everybody else — is to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight; and never stop
fighting.
— e. e. cummings
The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be
said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand
or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.
— William Faulkner
Expressing what you are is taking action. You can have many
great ideas in your head, but what makes the difference is the action. Without action upon an idea,
there will be no manifestation, no results, no reward.
– Miguel Angel Ruiz, The Four Agreements
In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Today the greatest single source of wealth is between your ears.
— Brian Tracy
To rebel in season is not to rebel.
— Greek Proverb
The wrong way always seems more reasonable.
— George Moore
Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself
by thinking once or twice a week.
— George Bernard Shaw
Creativity is a spiritual issue.
— Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity
We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop
trying to conform to our own or to other peoples' models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural
channel to open.
— Shakti Gwain
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you
into action and because there is only one you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you
block it, it will never exist through any medium and will be lost.
— Martha Graham
Workaholism is an addiction, and like all addictions,
it blocks creative energy.
— Julia Cameron, writing in The Artist's Way
I have never listened to authority. It is not in my DNA.
— Gary Vaynerchuk, Best-selling author, blogger, and entrepreneur (founder of Wine Library and Vayner
Media)
The more you reason the less you create.
— Raymond Chandler
Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.
— Bertrand Russell
To create, you must empty yourself of every artistic thought.
— Gilbert
Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era
when most people no longer believe in an after-life.
— Arianna Stassinopoulos
I must create a system or be enslaved by another
man's; I will not reason and compare: my business is to
create.
— William Blake
Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty— as a way of enjoying elitism without
guilt: God did it.
— Florence King
It's easy to live the expected and conventional. It's when you live the
unexpected that you start having fun with your life.
— from Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul by Richard Bach
If you want to express your creativity, then don’t choose a path where someone else tells you what
to do and how to do it. Choose a path where creativity is rewarded, not punished.
— Steve Pavlina
We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of
creation, but he does not know what to create.
— José Ortega y Gasset
An original is a creation motivated by desire.
Any reproduction of an original is motivated be necessity . . .
It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates
gratuitous forms.
To create is divine, to reproduce is human.
— Man Ray
Don’t be different. Be unique. Anybody can be different. All that means is
“to stand out.” Unique means “the only one.” Be the only one.
— Scott Ginsberg
If everybody thinks you’re out of your mind, you just might be onto
something.
— Jack Canfield
That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.
— John Stuart Mill
Question everything, even if it represents generations of conventional
wisdom.
— Robert J. Ringer
Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form
of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently
regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the
opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
— Dame Edith Sitwell
If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.
— Charles Kettering
Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of
eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral
courage which it contained.
— John Stuart Mill
The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a
certain kind of mind — computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs
who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very
different kind of person with a very different kind of mind — creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers
and meaning makers. These people — artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big
picture thinkers — will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.
— Dan Pink, A Whole New Mind
Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do
so, most of us immediately get busy on the proof.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
To be willing to suffer in order to create is one thing; to realize that one's creation necessitates
one's suffering, that suffering is one of the greatest of God's gifts, is almost to reach a mystical
solution of the problem of evil.
— J. W. N. Sullivan
People who create things nowadays can expect to be prosecuted by highly
moralistic people who are incapable of creating anything. There is no way to measure the chilling effect on
innovation that results from the threats of taxation, regulation and prosecution against anything that
succeeds. We'll never know how many ideas our government has aborted in the name protecting us.
— Joseph Sobran
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not. A sense of humor
was provided to console him for what he is.
— Horace Walpole
If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you
can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.
— S. I. Hayakawa
The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its
limits.
— Unknown wise person
What is genius — but the power of expressing a new individuality?
— Elizabeth Barrett Brownin
You have to be original. If you're like everyone else, what do they need
you for?
— B. Peters
People will accept your idea much more readily if you tell them that
Benjamin Franklin said it first.
— David H. Comins
Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath
of mediocrities as lightning rods draw the flashes.
— Theodor Reik
In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of
producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.
— Raoul Vaneigem
Social Security is a creative way to find great pleasure in being terribly
deceived.
— The Creativity Guy writing on his Redroom Author's
Blog
Even a crackpot can occassionally come up with a great idea.
But that's as far as most great ideas go — ideas and no more.
Any amazing idea of yours will always remain amazing in your mind — and absolutely without merit in the
real world — as long as you are afraid to do something with it.
— from Life's Secret Handbook
Words that do not match deeds are not important.
— Ernesto Che Guevara
It doesn't matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.
— Elias Canetti
It's the creative people throughout the ages — the ones willing to risk, think differently,
challenge the status quo, and ruffle a few feathers — who have made the biggest difference in this world.
With a little more imaginative thinking, you can be one of these people.
— from Life's Secret Handbook
The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
— Albert Camus
Much of our American progress has been the product of the individual who had an idea; pursued it;
fashioned it; tenaciously clung to it against all odds; and then produced it, sold it, and profited from
it.
— Hubert H. Humphrey
A great wind is blowing, and that gives you
either imagination or a headache.
— Catharine the Great
The only place opportunity cannot be found is in a closed-minded person.
— Bo Bennett
Only the most foolish of mice would hide in a cat's ear. But only the
wisest of cats would think to look there.
— Andrew Mercer
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
— Goethe
Imagination allows you to think of the journey worth making. Motivation
gets you started. But, it's patience and perseverance that get you there.
— from Life's Secret Handbook
A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.
— Richard Branson
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
— Albert Einstein
Business is not financial science; it's about trading, buying, and selling. It's about creating a
product or service so good that people will pay for it.
— Anita Roddick
Machines should work; people should think.
— Unknown Former IBM Wise Employee
A Bit of Craziness Is Good for Business
— from Career
Success Without a Real Job
The things we fear most in organizations — fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances —
are the primary sources of creativity.
— Margaret J. Wheatley
Those who are different change the world.
Those who are ordinary do their best to keep it the way it is.
— Unknown wise person
I shall make electricity so cheap that only the rich can afford to burn candles.
— Thomas Edison
I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things
beyond where they've been.
— Sam Walton
Ideas, like young wine, should be put in storage and taken up only after they have
been given time to ferment and ripen.
— Richard Strauss
There is a correlation between the creative and the screwball. So we must
suffer the screwball gladly.
— Kingman
Brewster
If an idea does not appear bizarre, there is no hope for it.
— Niels Bohr
Two roads diverged in a wood and I took the one less travelled by, and
that has made all the difference.
— Robert Frost
There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased that line.
— Oscar Levant
The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by somebody else's rules,
while quietly playing by your own.
— Michael Korda
In the modern world of business it is useless to be a creative original
thinker unless you can also sell what you create.
— David M. Ogilvy
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
— John F. Kennedy
Don't play for safety. It's the most dangerous game in the world.
— Sir Hugh Walpole
Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
— Walter Lippmann
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn: it can be stabbed to
death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow.
— Charlie Brower
Originality is the one thing unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.
— John Stuart Mill
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
— Sigmund Freud
There is no monument dedicated to the memory of a committee.
— Lester J. Pourclau
I have not failed. I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.
— Thomas Alva Edison
Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not
grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.
— Eric Hoffer
The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.
— Max Lerner
Surround yourself with problem solvers, not problem creators.
— Robert J. Ringer
True creativity often starts where language ends.
— Arthur Koestler
Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.
— Brian Aldiss
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn: it can be stabbed to death by a quip and
worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow.
— Charlie Brower
A lot of people have great ideas, but nothing in the world is cheaper than
a good idea with no action.
— Unknown Wise Person
Ideas, like young wine, should be put in storage and taken up only after they have been given time to
ferment and ripen.
— Richard Strauss
Any powerful idea is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until
we choose to use it.
— Richard Bach
I don't give a damn for any man who can spell a word only one way.
— Mark Twain
If your house is on fire, warm yourself by it.
— Spanish proverb
If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to
everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.
— from Zen, Beginner's Mind
All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.
— John Stuart Mill
The jean! The jean is the destructor. It is a dictator! It is destroying
creativity! The jean must be stopped!
— Pierre Cardin
A man's mind, stretched by new ideas, may never return to its original dimensions.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Freedom is the only law which genius knows.
— James Russell Lowell
There are nine ways of poaching eggs, and each of them is worse than the other.
— Robert Lynd
There are two principles for creative success — one general and one definitive.
The general principle is that everyone has the ability to be creative and make a big difference in this
world.
The definitive principle is that almost everyone has volunteered to be exempt from the general
principle.
Choose to be in the minority and you will have little competition in your quest for creating something
spectacular.
— from Life's Secret Handbook
Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up because they’re looking for
ideas.
— Paula Poundstone
By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.
— Confucius
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
— Mark Twain
In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.
— James Russell Lowell
If confusion is the first step to knowledge, I must be a genius.
— Larry Leissner
A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.
— Albert Einstein
If it works, it's obsolete.
— Marshall McLuhan
Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips
it in the bud. Any of us will put out more and better ideas if ou efforts are appreciated.
— Alex F. Osborn
A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket, and write down the
thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable, and should be secured,
because they seldom return.
— Francis Bacon
When you find yourself on the side of majority, question yourself about
what you are doing and why. It is likely wrong.
— from Look Ma, Life's
Easy (An Inspirational Novel about
How Ordinary People Attain Extraordinary Results)
The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.
— Alfred North Whitehead
In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than
an oak.
— James Russell Lowell
All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
