creativity

• If your goal is to make the world a better place, one thing you can do is pick a specific challenge that you really care about. Then, learn as much as you can about it and try to volunteer your time to help an organization that is working in this area.

  — Bill Gates

• We've tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we've not been very inventive.

  — Carl Sagan

• And I do like group invention. I think there's really nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a group of smart people and spitballing and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas, and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth.

  — Jeff Bezos

• Elegance is necessarily unnatural, only achieveable at great expense. If you just do something, it won't be elegant, but if you do it and then see what might be more elegant, and do it again, you might, after an unknown number of iterations, get something that is very elegant.

  — Erik Naggum

• There’s a balance you have to have between being very critical of yourself and your work while also maintaining a strong faith in your own ability. Your unique voice and perspective matter and if you can find a way to bring that out then you will create something special.

  — Eric Barone

• [ Computing ] is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.

  — Alan Kay

• Sometimes the answers are hiding in plain sight. A eureka moment came to Archimedes when he connected the dots between the ordinary routine of taking a bath and the scientific pursuit of determining the volume of an irregularly shaped object.

  — Newton Lee

• One sometimes finds what one is not looking for.

  — Alexander Fleming

• When no idea seems right, the right one must seem wrong.

  — Marvin Minsky

• A new form is not intelligible to everyone; many find it difficult. Perhaps. The ordinary, the banal is, of course, simpler, more pleasant, more comfortable.

  — Yevgeny Zamyatin

• You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects

  — Bassel Khartabil

• I can find Greece and Palestine and Italy and England and the Islands, the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind.

  — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• There once was a brainy baboon, Who always breathed down a bassoon, For he said, "It appears That in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune".

  — Arthur Eddington

• Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.

  — Steve Jobs

• Pixar is the most technically advanced creative company; Apple is the most creatively advanced technical company.

  — Steve Jobs

• Games with ragdoll death animations just make it look even more ridiculous. One moment an enemy is strafing and firing at full speed, the next his entire body just goes limp like Mr. Scotty teleported his skeleton out of his body or something. (19 July 2007)

  — Yahtzee Croshaw

• Propriety is that perfection of style which comes when a work is authoritatively constructed on approved principles. It arises from prescription, from usage, or from nature.

  — Vitruvius

• There's the moment when you know you can find out the answer and that's the period you are sleepless before you know what it is. When you've got it and know what it is, then you can rest easy.

  — Dorothy Hodgkin

• Science and art both project the world along certain coordinates. Differences in form are due only to differences in the coordinates.

  — Yevgeny Zamyatin