Every day, everywhere our children spread their dreams beneath our feet and we should tread softly.
You can be creative in anything – in math, science, engineering, philosophy – as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.
In a world where lifelong employment in the same job is a thing of the past, creativity is not a luxury. It is essential for personal security and fulfillment.
Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play.
Passion is the driver of achievement in all fields. Some people love doing things they don’t feel they’re good at. That may be because they underestimate their talents or haven’t yet put the work in to develop them.
All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities.
Helping people to connect with their personal creative capacities is the surest way to release the best they have to offer.
Teaching for creativity aims to encourage self-confidence, independence of mind, and the capacity to think for oneself.
Imagination is the source of all human achievement.
Human intelligence is richer and more dynamic than we have been led to believe by formal academic education.
You don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? He was seven at some point. He was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he? How annoying would that be?
Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.
Creativity is a process more often than it is an event.
We are educating people out of their creative capacities.
The dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn’t count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don’t enjoy it, who don’t get any real benefit from it.
All kids have tremendous talents – and we squander them pretty ruthlessly.
A three-year-old is not half a six-year-old.
I mean, really, whatever you woke up worrying about this morning, get over it. How important in the greater scheme of things can it possibly be? Make your peace and move on.
Creativity is very much like literacy. We take it for granted that nearly everybody can learn to read and write. If a person can’t read or write, you don’t assume that this person is incapable of it, just that he or she hasn’t learned how to do it. The same is true of creativity.
It’s not what happens to us that makes the difference in our lives. What makes the difference is our attitude towards what happens. The idea of luck is a powerful way of illustrating the importance of our basic attitudes in affecting whether or not we find our Element.