Life is "trying things to see if they work."

- Ray Bradbury

There is not a work of art that is without short cuts.

- Andre Gide

No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond.

- Zora Neale Hurston

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

- Paul Gauguin

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.

- Shel Silverstein

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.

- Robert C. Fuller

Obstacles don't have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don't turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.

- Michael Jordan

There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.

- Edward de Bono

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

- Charles Mingus

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so foaming, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!

- Soren Kierkegaard

I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others... I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.

- Thomas Edison

Leadership is about creating, day by day, a domain in which we and those around us continually deepen our understanding of reality and are able to participate in shaping the future. This, then, is the deeper territory of leadership -- collectively "listening to what is wanting to emerge in the world, and then having the courage to do what is required."

- Joseph Jaworski

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

- John Cage

Because it's so easy to copy anything, a lot of people have convinced themselves that they shouldn't have to pay for it. Well, the reason you get paid is because the people who sit all day long at their desks creating books and songs and software have mortgages. And if you're only going to sell one copy of everything and then the world is going to make a gazillion pirated copies off of it, it's going to be really hard to pay your mortgage.

- Pat Schroeder

Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.

- Noam Chomsky

Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.

- Madame de Stael



Establishing goals is all right if you don't let them deprive you of interesting detours.

- Doug Larson



Determine the thing that can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way.

- Abraham Lincoln



Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts.

- Rita Mae Brown



There's no use talking about the problem unless you talk about the solution.

- Betty Williams



I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution.

- Werner von Braun



When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.

- George Washington Carver



I seem to have been like a child playing on the seashore, finding new and then a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.

- Isaac Newton



Everyone has to learn to think differently, bigger, to open to possibilities.

- Oprah Winfrey



Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way.
I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the
appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.

- A. A. Milne



That ideas should spread freely from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

- Thomas Paine



A positive mind finds a way it can be done; a negative mind looks for all the ways it can't be done.

- Napoleon Hill



Innovation is the creation of the new or the re-arranging of the old in a new way.

- Michael Vance



Instead of a bottom-line based on money and power, we need a new bottom-line that defines productivity and creativity as where corporations, governments, schools, public institutions, and social practices are judged as efficient, rational and productive not only to the extent they maximize money and power, but to the extent they maximize love and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and our capacities to respond with awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation.

- Michael Lerner



I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

- Vincent van Gogh



I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.

- Albert Einstein



Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.

- Rene Descartes



Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way to create.

- Lillian Hellman



If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?

- Will Rogers



One of the first things a relationship therapist learns is that couples argue to burn up energy that could be used for something else. In fact, arguments often serve the purpose of using up energy, so that the couple do not have to take the courageous, creative leap into an unknown they fear. Arguing serves the function of being a zone of familiarity into which you can retreat when you are afraid of making a creative breakthrough.

- Gay Hendricks



In seeking to avoid evil, [humanity] is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is [our] ingenuity, rather than [our] animal nature, that has given [our] fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.

- Ernest Becker



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]

- Sharon Welch



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.

- V. S. Naipaul



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.

- Peter Senge



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.

- Alan Alda



Remember the two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what doesn't work; and second, the failure gives you the opportunity to try a new approach.

- Anne Sullivan



For every failure, there's an alternative course of action. You just have to find it. When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.

- Mary Kay Ash



Eveyone is a genius at least once a year. A real genius has his original ideas closer together.

- Georg C. Lichtenberg



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.

- Abraham Maslow



A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

- Douglas Adams