The Marketing Bureau

“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

“There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.” 

Martha Graham

“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” Theodore Levitt

“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.” 

Charles Brower

“When we engage in what we are naturally suited to do, our work takes on the quality of play and it is play that stimulates creativity.”

Linda Naiman

“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

“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.”

Edward de Bono

“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 . . .”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”

William James

“The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things-ancient history, nineteenth century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later, or six months, or six years. But he has faith that it will happen.”

Carl Ally

“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.”

Mary Lou Cook

“You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” Jack London

“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.”

Henry Ward Beecher

“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

“Nothing is done. Everything in the world remains to be done or done over. The greatest picture is not yet painted, the greatest play isn’t written, the greatest poem is unsung. There isn’t in all the world a perfect railroad, nor a good government, nor a sound law. Physics, mathematics, and especially the most advanced and exact of the sciences are being fundamentally revised. . . Psychology, economics, and sociology are awaiting a Darwin, whose work in turn is awaiting an Einstein.”

Lincoln Steffens

“The world is but a canvas to the imagination.” 

Henry David Thoreau

“We have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent categories and have for the first time in history created an industry without art.” 

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

“So you see, imagination needs moodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.” 

Brenda Ueland

“Creativity is… seeing something that doesn’t exist already. You need to find out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God.”

Michele Shea

“The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.”

Stephen Nachmanovitch

“As competition intensifies, the need for creative thinking increases. It is no longer enough to do the same thing better . . . no longer enough to be efficient and solve problems”

 Edward de Bono

“Listen to anyone with an original idea, no matter how absurd it may sound at first. If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need.”

William McKnight, 3M President

“Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has had an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.” Nolan Bushnell

“All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.”

Albert Camus

“You write your first draft with your heart and you re-write with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think.”

Sean Connery

“Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

Walt Disney

“God is really another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.”

Pablo Picasso

“To draw, you must close your eyes and sing.”

Pablo Picasso

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“The wastebasket is a writer’s best friend.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer