Eric Hoffer Creative Quotations

The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.

Creativity is discontent translated into arts.

The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capacities and talents.

Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.

To the creative individual all experience is seminal-all events are equidistant from new ideasand insights.

The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.

A person's creative ability decreases in direct proportion to the degree to which he takes himself seriously.

There is perhaps no better way of measuring the natural endowment of a soul than by its ability to transmute dissatisfaction into a creative impulse.

There is probably nothing more sublime than discontent transmuted into a work of art, a scientific discovery, and so on.

In products of the human mind, simplicity marks the end of a process of refining, while complexity marks a primitive stage. Michelangelo 's definition of art as the purgation of superfluities suggests that the creative effort consists largely in the elimination of that which complicates and confuses a pattern