Quotes on creativity
“Throwing away ideas too soon is like opening a package of flower seeds and then throwing them away because they’re not pretty.”
— Arthur VanGundy, Ph.D. (Idea Power, 1992)
Daydreams are fertile ground for the imagination. While daydreaming rational thought goes out the window, so new perspectives can find their way in.
— Linda Naiman (Dynamic Graphics Magazine Dec/Jan 03)
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Arthur Molella, Lemelson Center Director,
“Play is serious business. At stake for us are the ways we socialize and teach future generations of scientists, inventors, artists, explorers, and other individuals who will shape the work in which we live. It is safe to say that humans, as a species, have always had a concept of play. But only recently has play begun getting the serious attention it deserves as a source of discovery.” (Creativity at Work Newsletter July 02)
Albert Einstein
If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
Julius Sextus Frontinus
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
–Highly regarded engineer in Rome, 1st century A.D.
Charles Franklin Kettering (1876-1958) U. S. engineer and inventor.
Whenever you look at a piece of work and you think the fellow was crazy, then you want to pay some attention to that. One of you is likely to be, and you had better find out which one it is. It makes an awful lot of difference.
Albert Szent-Gyorgi
(Nobel-prize winning biochemist who discovered vitamin C)
And if everybody says that you are wrong, then you are one step ahead. But here is one situation which is better still, when everyone begins to laugh about you, then you know you are two steps ahead.
Max Planck
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out.
In “Shorter Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations,” by John Bartlett, 1937, 1980, 1992.
