Creativity and Originality
Provided below is a collection of quotes concerning creativity and originality. For your response pick one quote and discuss what it is saying and its implications. Then make and defend a decision for how creative you want you story to be. Please, don't feel forced to not rely on any sourced or previous ideas, these quotes are merely to allow you to make a choice and hopefully inspire you to at least use and develop some of your own ideas. When you are done return to Story Elements and continue with the Story Length element.
Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.
- Charles Mingus
Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns to look at things in a different way.
- Edward De Bono (adapted)
Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.
- Oliver Wendell Holms
People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.
- R. Buckminster Fuller
If you fall in love with an idea, you won't see the merits of alternative approaches—and will probably miss an opportunity or two. One of life's great pleasures is letting go of a previously cherished idea. Then you're free to look for new ones. What part of your idea are you in love with? What would happen if you kissed it goodbye?
- Roger von Oech
Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.
- George Kneller
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
- Erich Fromm
Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
- Sir Cecil Beaton
Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.
- Mary Lou Cook
The essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail.
- Edwin H. Land
Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.
- Pablo Picasso
Concern over criticism clogs creativity.
- Duane Alan Hahn
A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations.
- Gerald G. Jampolsky
Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
- Arthur Koestler
When all think alike, then no one is thinking.
- Walter Lippman
Minds are like parachutes: they only function when open.
- Thomas R. Dewar
He who never walks except where he sees other men's tracks will make no discoveries.
- Unknown
They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.
- Antonio Porchia
Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.
- George Lois
A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
- Oscar Wilde
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
- Bernard Berenson
Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.
- Edwin H. Land
I invent nothing, I rediscover.
- Auguste Rodin
Nothing is new except arrangement.
- William J. Durant
What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.
- Dean William R. Inge
Begin with another's to end with your own.
- Baltasar Gracian
Originality is nothing but judicious plagiarism.
- Voltaire
To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.
- Lichtenberg
The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.
- Alan Ashley-Pitt
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
- Arthur Koestler