Success
Eighty percent of success is showing up.
—Woody Allen
Wild Side
. . . perhaps the most important thing we can ever do in our lives is find a way to keep the wild—both the wild inside and the wild outside us—and tap into it.
—Anne Rivers Siddons
Questions
A creative life is a continued quest, and good questions are useful guides. We have found that the most useful questions are open-ended; they allow a fresh, unanticipated answer to reveal itself.
—psychologist Daniel Goleman, filmmaker Paul Kaufman and educator Michael Ray (collaborators on “The Creative Spirit,” a 1992 PBS series )
Discovery
A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.
—Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Hungarian-American Biochemist
Creativity
A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.
—Frank Capra, film director
Failure
A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
—George Bernard Shaw
Imagination
A man has always to be busy with his thoughts if anything is to be accomplished.
—Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Dutch Microbiologist
Inspiration
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
Change
A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone.
—Francis Picabia, French painter/illustrator/designer
Learning
A person who can create ideas worthy of note is a person who has learned much from others.
—Konosuke Matsushita
Individuality
A personal style is like a handwriting—it happens as the byproduct of our way of seeing things, enriched by the experiences of everything around us.
— Massimo Vignelli, designer (from Becoming a Graphic Designer by Steven Heller and Teresa Fernandes)
Inspiration
A rich leaven of so-called useless information may create the very ferment that triggers a breakthough.
—Erwin Di Cyan (from Creativity: Road to Self-Discovery)
Art
All art is but imitation of nature.
—Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Roman writer/philosopher (5 B.C.–A.D. 65)
Color
All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.
—W.H. Auden
Work
All great work—artistic, poetic, intellectual or spiritual—is produced at those moments when creators forget themselves altogether and are free from self-consciousness.
—Walpola Rahula
Art
All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.
—M.C. Richards
Inspiration
All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.
—Grant Wood, painter
Change
Allow Events to Change You: You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openess to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
—Bruce Mau, designer (from ''An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth'')
Learning
Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and the ideas of others.
—Bruce Mau, designer (from ''An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth'')
Individuality
Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.
—Judy Garland
Work
Always make the effort to take things one step beyond.
—Michael Ian Kaye, designer (from Becoming a Graphic Designer by Steven Heller and Teresa Fernandes)
Risk
An act of imagination, a speculative adventure...underlies every improvement of natural knowledge.
—Sir Peter Brian Medawar, British Zoologist
Goals
Always dream and shoot higher than you know how to. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
—William Faulkner, author
Time
Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes you happy, satisfied, even joyous. That has more of an effect on economic well-being than any other single factor.
—Paul Hawken
Failure
An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.
—Dr. Edwin Land
Imagination
An idea is salvation by imagination.
—Frank Lloyd Wright
Risk
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
—Anais Nin
Color
Another real thing! I am not dead yet! I can still call forth a piece of soul and set it down in color, fixed forever.
— Keri Hulme
Risk
Anxiety is the essential condition of intellectual and artistic creation and everything that is finest in human history.
—Charles Frankel
Creativity
Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. The creative person looks for history in a hardware store and fashion in an airport.
—Robert Wieder, U.S. journalist
Risk
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
—Albert Einstein
Work
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
—Annie Dillard
Art
Art for art’s sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of the true, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.
—George Sand, French novelist (1804-1876)
Art
Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.
—Claus Oldenburg
Learning
As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.
—Margaret Mead, U.S. Anthropologist
Art
As to the artists, do we not know that he only of them whom love inspires has the light of fame? He whom love touches not walks in darkness.
—Plato, Greek philosopher (427–347 B.C.)
Learning
Ask Stupid Questions: Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.
—Bruce Mau, designer (from ''An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth'')
Discovery
Avoid Fields. Jump Fences: Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life.
—Bruce Mau, designer (from ''An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth'')
Design
Avoid Software: The problem with software is that everyone has it.
—Bruce Mau, designer (from ''An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth'')
Risk
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
—Helen Keller
Risk
Be brave, right through, and leave for the unknown.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Discovery
Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction.
—Wenell Berry
Inspiration
Be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
—Franz Kafka
Reflection
Being empty is a beginning.
—Sue Bender (from Everyday Sacred)
Reflection
Build an inner place to protect your truth.
—Richard Bach ( from Running From Safety)
Design
Be culturally literate, because if you don’t have any understanding of the world you live in and the culture you live in, you’re not going to be able to express anything to anybody else.
— Paula Scher, designer (from Becoming a Graphic Designer by Steven Heller and Teresa Fernandes)
Individuality
Be yourself and think for yourself; and while your conclusions may not be infallible, they will be nearer right than the conclusions forced on you by those who have a personal interest in keeping you in ignorance.
—Elbert Hubbard, author
Work
Begin Anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
—Bruce Mau, designer (from ''An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth'')
Art
Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterwards summer may not come.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Failure
Capture Accidents: The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
—Bruce Mau, designer (from ''An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth'')
Chance
Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.
—Ovid
Change
Change only favours minds that are diligently looking and preparing for discovery.
—Louie Pasteur
Change
Change your thoughts and you change your world.
—Norman Vincent Peale
Inspiration
Coffee Breaks, Cab Rides, Green Rooms: Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to. In the interstitial spaces—what Dr. Suess calls ‘the waiting places.’
—Bruce Mau, designer (from ''An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth'')
Creativity
Collaborate: The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight and vast creative potential.
—Bruce Mau, designer (from ''An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth'')
Reflection
Computers are useless, they can only give you answers.
—Pablo Picasso
Design
Content is important, not style.
— Greg Samata, designer (from Becoming a Graphic Designer by Steven Heller and Teresa Fernandes)
Risk
Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.
—Raymond Lindquist, author
Inspiration
Creative inspiration is more about what the world is doing. One can find inspiration in anything from an old Kabuki program from Japan to Mayan inscriptions on steles in Belize.
—Petrula Vrontikis, designer
Creativity
Creative living entails taking control of our own lives and striving to fulfill our deepest dreams. It means using our heart and our head to create new options. It means living the life we want for our-selves instead of passively letting ourselves be mold
—Victor Dishy, psychologist
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