Creative Process Quotes
(50+ quotes)
Creative process quotes show us how to cultivate the creativity skills needed in the 21st century. We’re born ‘creators’ with process preferences and loads of potential. We just need to practice.
As a creativity researcher, I promise you are way more creative than you think you are. I put together this unique collection of creative process quotes because I believe it has the power to unlock the world’s largest untapped natural resource: our creative potential.
Our brains are all creative. All acts of self-expression are creative. The ‘gift’ of imagination is exclusively a human trait. When we adapt a recipe, solve a problem, decorate our home, teach something, raise a child, use duct tape to fix something – you name it - we are being creative. Everything I just mentioned is an example of creative process.
When we understand creativity is not limited to making great art, music, or big scientific discoveries or delivering a ‘product’ that needs some sort of ‘expert’ approval, exciting doors begin to open in our life. No one needs to give you permission to be creative. You are creative now, and the more you practice the creative process you find most meaningful and fun, the quicker you’ll understand you’ve always been creative.
Want to feel more creative? Start to move more: dance, move, go for walks in nature, get inspired – read books, magazines or blogs about topics you’re have an interest in, follow your passions, play with different mediums and processes (journaling, poetry, expressive arts or movement, learn how to play an instrument, take voice or improve lessons) – the list is literally endless. Begin to practice mindfulness at least 15 minutes every day. For every worry, imagine 5 terrific outcomes. And start to look at your challenges through the eyes of a 7 year old child – be curious, combine unlikely objects, play more and you’ll soon discover your infinite storehouse of creativity.
If you are interested in taking my Creative Process: Awakening Creative Potential for Personal and Professional Growth course on-line, send me a note: Marta@JoyofQuotes.com
Your personal joy, inspiration and creativity coach,
Try Creativity , Imagination, or Self-expression Quotes
Abraham Maslow
In the creative process, one action leads to another, and the final outcome is shaped by a chain of expressions that could never be planned in advance.
Shaun McNiff
I say that you can’t teach how to be creative unless you’ve experienced the joys and frustrations of the creative process.
Jane Piirto
It gives me such peace to draw; more than prayer, walks, anything.
Sylvia Plath Tweet this Quote!
Creativity is our vital life-force energy. Having some energy aids us in being creative. But it is not a prerequisite. If we allow ourselves to enter into the creative process even if we feel tired, bored, or stuck, that creative process opens the energy flow in our body/mind/spirit.
Natalie Rogers
At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer.
Rachel Naomi Remen
We do not have to know where we are going at the beginning of the creative act. People who control the work in advance are pushing against the grain of creation.
Shaun McNiff
Society has squeezed the tasty juice of the creative process right out of most of its citizens. We need to find ways to recapture our spontaneous freedom of expression, without looking to others for approval.
Natalie Rogers - The Creative Connection: Expressive Arts as Healing
The creative process as experienced through the expressive arts is one path to self-discovery, self-esteem, and self-empowerment.
Natalie Rogers - The Creative Connection: Expressive Arts as Healing
The creative process includes exploring, experimenting, messing around with materials, being playful, entering into the unknown.
Natalie Rogers - The Creative Connection: Expressive Arts as Healing
Within each of us is a secret garden: a place where our true self exists…Whatever grows in the garden, it is all part of being human. It is all material that can be used in the creative process.
Natalie Rogers - The Creative Connection: Expressive Arts as Healing
Creativity lifts you out of difficulties, over the edge of fear, and on to the wild ride of new possibilities.
Carole Watanable
Creativity is a force moving through us, and only through practice do we learn how to cooperate with it. The ‘process’ is like a muscle. It needs to be exercised in order to function effortlessly.
Shaun McNiff
Curiosity and attentiveness become active participants in the creative process as we learn how to watch what we do while we are doing it. This is not easy, because our ego 'judges' are thoroughly ingrained in us, but struggles abate as commitment and familiarity increase. Art becomes part of the tradition of meditation where watchfulness is essential. Whatever a person paints, dances, or sings has significance when we restrain ego's value judgments. These discoveries are similar to the meditator's experience of wonder in something that was once boring and insignificant. Judgment yields to awareness.
Shaun McNiff - Art as Medicine
Intensities of the creative process can stimulate desires of consistency and control, but history affirms that few transformative experiences are generated by regularity.
Shaun McNiff - Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go
The process of ‘becoming alive' is the flow experience.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Tweet this Quote!
While the arts lie on the margins of most people's lives, creative process is central to who we are as humans. Learning, growth, and transformation are creative processes, and it is the act of seeing connections that
Kim Hermanson
We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.
Bill Hicks Tweet this Quote!
There are two ways to being creatively productive. One is not being daunted by one's fear of failure. The second is sheer perseverance.
Mary-Claire King
Creativity has two parts: thinking, then producing. Innovation is embedded in the creative process. It is the implementation of creative inspiration.
Linda Naiman
Creativity starts with a process of imagining, exploring, and expressing. We can all do it. But it's a risk; it's a leap, and needs an environment free of evaluation to thrive.
Marta Davidovich Ockuly
Practice and repetition are as essential for building creative muscles as they are for physical fitness.
Marta Davidovich Ockuly
The task is less ‘teaching creativity' than ‘building creative confidence.' Pathways to awakening latent creative potential are opened by practicing personally meaningful creative process.
Marta Davidovich Ockuly
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
You become more divine as you become more creative. All the religions of the world have said God is the creator. I don't know whether he is the creator or not, but one thing I know: the more creative you become, the more godly you become. When your creativity comes to a climax, when your whole life becomes creative, you live in God. So he must be the creator because people who have been creative have been closest to him. Love what you do. Be meditative while you are doing it – whatsoever it is!
Osho
Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh Tweet this Quote!
Instead of competing, all we have to do is create.
Earl Nightingale Tweet this Quote!
A daily creative project is like a marathon. It's a ridiculously daunting task, but making an original creation every day gives you an incredible sense of accomplishment. It also forces you to push beyond your mental and physical barriers (especially the ones you've erected for yourself). You'll be amazed at what you produce and what you learn about yourself in the process.
Noah Scalin
The ability to live in the question long enough for genius to emerge is a touchstone of creative success.
Jonathan Fields
To fully nurture the creative potential of others requires modeling the behaviors, attitudes and actions consistant with a creative learner. Development of one's creative expression is therefore first.
Susan Keller-Mathers
We express our being by creating. Creativity is a necessary sequel to being.
Rollo May Tweet this Quote!
Drawing is a door to discovering your own creativity.
Jonathan Milne Tweet this Quote!
Creativity is a process more often than it is an event.
Ken Robinson Tweet this Quote!
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.
Voltaire Tweet this Quote!
There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
Henri Bergson
Each of us possesses a creative self. Claiming that is a transformational art. When you begin to act on your creativity, what you find inside may be more valuable than what you produce for the external world. The ultimate creative act is to express what is most authentic and individual about you.
Eileen M. Clegg
Even without success, creative persons find joy in a job well done. Learning for its own sake is rewarding.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Creativity is an act of self-discovery.
Sebastian Esteverena Tweet this Quote!
Creativity is a rare part of living. It's fundamental. None of us can squelch our creativity without feeling less than whole, incomplete and depressed.
Lynn Weiss
The creative person seems to have a special talent for dipping into his intuitive, image-filled right hemisphere while harnessing the illuminating experience with his left brain.
Steven Zinker
The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.
Stephen Nachmanovitch Tweet this Quote!
It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.
Miles Davis
Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let if first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.
Epictetus
The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Try a thing you haven't done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not.
Virgil Thomson
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good.
William Faulkner
Mortals must do what they are here to do creatively or they will become cranky.
Jill Badonsky Tweet this Quote!
No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.
Ansel Adams
Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process. Enthusiasm – from the Greek, filled with God' – is an ongoing energy supply tapped into the flow of life itself.
Julia Cameron
The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.
Julia Cameron Tweet this Quote!
Trust the process of the subtle push toward art and creative expression from inside you – it is the gentle call of your heart and renewed search for soul. It is an opening to expansion of your expressive abilities and the discovery of hidden limitations ready to be challenged. Be open to what it means, it has many possibilities for action in every part of your life. Ultimately it will lead to significant personal changes – to living life in a new way with new tools of creative expression.
Donald William Mathews
We cannot will to have insights. We cannot will to have creativity, but we can will to give ourselves to the creative experience with intensity of dedication and commitment.
Rollo May
Creative expression requires an ability to work with feelings and channel them. Frustration, dissatisfaction, and even a sense of desperation may help you access an eloquence you never knew existed.
Shaun McNiff
The power of mistakes enables us to reframe creative blocks and turn them around…The troublesome parts of our work, the parts that are most baffling and frustrating, are in fact the growing edges. We see these opportunities the instant we drop our preconceptions and our self-importance.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Creative action leads to ‘joy attraction'.
Marta Davidovich Ockuly Tweet this Quote!
To live creatively free, do what you know how to do now, then ‘act as if' you know how to do the rest.
SARK
It is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed.
Vida D. Scudder Tweet this Quote!
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