Creativity and innovation quotes

All achievement, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea!

The problem with competition is that it takes away the requirement to set your own path, to invent your own method, to find a new way.

Listen instead to your real customers, to your vision and make something for the long haul. Because that's how long it's going to take.

In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure.

The second person to write a story about a young boy and an escaped slave on the Mississippi wasn't a novelist, he was a typist.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

It is true of the Nation, as of the individual, that the greatest doer must also be a great dreamer.

It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.

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.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.

Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem, in my opinion, to characterize our age.

I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait 'till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Restlessness is discontent, and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man, and I will show you a failure.

Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.

Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.

What I cannot create, I do not understand.

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.

A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question.

I've always been more interested in the future than in the past.

Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

If an ant seeks the rank of Solomon, don't smile contemptuously upon its quest. Everything you possess of skill, and wealth and handicraft, wasn't it first merely a thought and a quest?

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

The best is the enemy of the good.

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.

Only thoughts reached by walking have value.

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Creativity is just connecting things.

You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.

It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.

Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.

Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.

If you absolutely can't tolerate critics, then don't do anything new or interesting.

Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.

To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment.

Don't be intimidated by what you don't know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from everyone else.

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.

In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.

Make something people want.

Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending.

Live in the future, then build what's missing.

Our industry does not respect tradition, it only respects innovation.

If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

If the design takes a long time to build, it's the wrong design.

Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.

Don't worry, be crappy.

You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Oh the things you can find If you don't stay behind!

We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

One withstands the invasion of armies; one does not withstand the invasion of ideas.

Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.

Research your own experience; absorb what is useful, reject what is useless and add what is essentially your own.

Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others.

There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence transform a yellow spot into a sun.

[Computers] are useless. They can only give you answers.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.

Isolation makes you sensitive. As a kid, I felt I was the only person who was like that. But there's a good side to isolation. It makes you sensitive, and sensitivity is part of the creative process.

As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.

I dream for a living.