Quotes on Creativity & Ideas

Knowledge itself is power.
-- Francis Bacon

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
-- Albert Einstein

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein

You cannot solve the problem with the same kind of thinking that has created the problem.
-- Albert Einstein

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

I think and think for months, for years; 99 times the conclusion is wrong, but the hundredth it is right.
-- Albert Einstein

It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.
-- Albert Einstein

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-- Albert Einstein

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
-- Albert Einstein

All great ideas are dangerous.
-- Oscar Wilde

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
-- Howard Aiken

All great discoveries are made by people whose feelings run ahead of their thinking.
-- Charles Parkhurst

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
-- Linus Pauling

An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.
-- Robert A. Humphrey

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The test of a first--rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
-- Confucius

It is not enough to have knowledge, one must also apply it. It is not enough to have wishes, one must also accomplish.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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.
-- Buckminster Fuller

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
-- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
-- Poul Anderson

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
-- James Joyce

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.
-- Franklin P. Adams

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
-- Isaac Newton

No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.
-- Sir Isaac Newton

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge
-- Bertrand Russell

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.
-- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
-- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There are many people who have no desire to do anything differently than anyone else. And that's fine. We need to have people who are technically expert: people who play wonderful third fiddle, if you will, or people who carry out what we call normal experiments in science (ones which sort of fill in the tiny little holes which were left by the great creators). But some people want to push beyond that. And that's a personality kind of thing. It's nothing to do with how smart they are. It's whether they're the kinds of people who like to confront obstacles. Only people who've got that kind of irritation...irritability...where they're not satisfied just to do what other people want to do, but who really want to put themselves on the line and take a risk and face the void of going beyond where other people have gone who have any chance of being creative.
-- Howard Gardner

If you have the same ideas as everybody else but have them one week earlier than everyone else then you will be hailed as a visionary. But if you have them five years earlier you will be named a lunatic.
-- Barry Jones