Mary Lou Cook

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

2. “There's room for everybody on the planet to be creative and conscious if you are your own person. If you're trying to be like somebody else, then there isn't.” Tori Amos

3. “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” Carl Jung

4. “The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.“ Dee Hock

5. “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.“ Pablo Picasso

6. “The principal goal of education is to create men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done – men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers.” Jean Piaget

7. “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” Joseph Chilton Pierce

8. “Anxiety is part of creativity, the need to get something out, the need to be rid of something or to get in touch with something within.” David Duchovny

9. “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

10. “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

11. “If you hear a voice within you say, ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” Vincent Van Gogh

12. “Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way…. 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

13. ” Creativity is the quality that you bring to the activity that you are doing. It is an attitude, an inner approach – how you look at things . . . Whatsoever you do, if you do it joyfully, if you do it lovingly, if your act of doing is not purely economical, then it is creative.” Osho

14. “The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person.” Frank Barron

15. “So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.“ Brenda Ueland

16. “Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality overcomes everything.” George Lois

17. “One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams…. I do not take drugs, I AM drugs.” Salvador Dali

18. “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

19. “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge…. I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Albert Einstein

20. “When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: 'Only stand out of my light.' Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light.” John W. Gardner

21. “The creative process is, according to Freud, an alternative to neurosis, that is a defense mechanism protecting against neurosis, leading thus to the production of a socially acceptable source of entertainment and pleasure for the public. For the artist has the ability of turning his fantasies into artistic creations instead of into symptoms. The unconscious plays a major role in the act of creation. That is, the act of creation is made possible by the libido, the energy of the id, and by a defense mechanism considered to be the most beneficial – sublimation. By turning the sexual desire into a cultural manifestation with the help of the ego, sublimation makes the thoughts of the unconscious more acceptable to the conscious and it also allows for something productive, and pleasant, for the others as well.” Ana Drobot