Quotes about creativity for a brainstorm session work because they change the room’s mood faster than any icebreaker exercise. A good opener lowers performance anxiety, a mid-session line kills perfectionism, and a closer turns loose ideas into something people will actually act on. Below are ten verified lines, each with the creative principle behind it and a two-minute prompt you can run in the room.
A note on the quotes first. Every line here is attributed to a named speaker with a known source, a known work, or is flagged as circulating without a confirmed original. I have left out the creativity lines that float around the internet with no traceable origin, because a room full of people will repeat them back to you and someone will ask who said it.
Table of Contents
- 1Quotes About Creativity for a Brainstorm Session at a Glance
- 21. “Creativity is intelligence having fun.” — Albert Einstein
- 32. “The creative adult is the child who survived.” — Julian F. Fleron
- 43. “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” — Maya Angelou
- 54. “Creativity is the process of coming up with new and original ideas.” — unknown
- 65. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” — Maya Angelou
- 76. “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” — Linus Pauling
- 87. “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” — Albert Einstein
- 98. “Creativity is a way of being alert to the richness and novelty of the world.” — Mary Lou Maycott
- 109. “The function of creativity is to move knowledge from what you have to what you want.” — unknown
- 1110. “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” — Steve Jobs
- 12Frequently Asked Questions
- 13What is the best creativity quote to open a brainstorm session?
- 14How do I use creativity quotes without slowing down a brainstorm?
- 15How can I keep everyone participating in a creative brainstorming session?
- 16How should I handle quotes whose author is uncertain?
- 17Conclusion
Quotes About Creativity for a Brainstorm Session at a Glance
Here is the whole collection in one table, sorted by the job the quote does in the session rather than by who said it. Use this grid to pick your opener, your rescue line and your closing line in about ten seconds.
| Quote | Creative principle it names | How to use it in a session |
|---|---|---|
| Creativity is intelligence having fun. | Play lowers pressure | Open the session with it, then run a two-object combination prompt |
| The creative adult is the child who survived. | Permission to explore | Use when the room is behaving too politely to suggest anything |
| You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. | Ideas generate ideas | Read it before a timed round of variations on one idea |
| Creativity is the process of coming up with new and original ideas. | Originality | Define the goal of the session out loud with it |
| There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. | Story as raw material | Ask each person for a one-minute story, mine them for angles |
| The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. | Quantity before judgement | Read before listing, so nobody starts filtering early |
| Imagination is more important than knowledge. | Possibility over constraint | Turn it into a what-if question the room must answer |
| Creativity is a way of being alert to the richness and novelty of the world. | Observation as fuel | Run a five-minute noticing exercise before idea generation |
| The function of creativity is to move knowledge from what you have to what you want. | Purposeful problem-solving | Make the group write the problem statement in one line |
| The only way to do great work is to love what you do. | Motivation as fuel | Close with it, after each person names what they care about |
1. “Creativity is intelligence having fun.” — Albert Einstein
Einstein wrote the line in a letter while explaining how he arrived at a particular idea. The useful part for a group is not the genius of it but the mechanism: he treated the act of thinking as something you enjoy rather than endure.
Fun in a brainstorm session removes the audience problem. Once nobody is performing competence, half-finished thoughts get finished.
Prompt to run: hand each person two unrelated objects written on a card, such as a parking ticket and a violin bow, and give them ninety seconds to describe a product or service built from both. Nobody evaluates. You are generating links between distant categories, which is the whole point of the exercise.
2. “The creative adult is the child who survived.” — Julian F. Fleron
Fleron wrote the line in an essay of the same name, arguing that the people who keep making things are the ones who kept their childhood willingness to experiment without checking whether it looked sensible.
In a room, this gives you language for the moment when everybody is being sensible. Most stalled sessions are not out of ideas, they are out of permission.
Prompt to run: ask the group to name one rule the team follows that nobody has tested in two years. Write all of them on the board, then pick two and ask what would happen if you broke them on purpose.
3. “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” — Maya Angelou
Angelou used the line to push back on the idea that originality is a fixed personal supply you can spend down. She meant the opposite of what tired people assume: you get better at this the more often you do it.
That makes it the right quote for the moment right after somebody generates an idea and immediately starts arguing with it.
Prompt to run: take the first idea anyone offers, then set a timer for three minutes and ask for only variations on it. No new concepts, just versions of the same concept. The second and third variations are always more useful than the first.
4. “Creativity is the process of coming up with new and original ideas.” — unknown
This line circulates widely without a traceable author, and it earns its place because it is almost definitionally useful when a group has drifted into arguing about one idea instead of producing several.
Originality here means the idea is not the first thing anyone would say. It does not have to be unprecedented. It has to not be a restatement.
Prompt to run: put a familiar object on the table and ask each person to reinvent it for a user who does not exist yet. A water bottle for someone with one hand, for example, forces the group off the shelf.
5. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” — Maya Angelou
Angelou wrote this in a letter to her daughter about the stories she had never finished telling. In a brainstorm it is a reminder that the most original material in the room is usually personal and unfinished, not polished.
Groups default to safe abstractions. A real story breaks that default, and every good campaign or narrative idea is usually hiding inside somebody’s anecdote.
Prompt to run: give everyone sixty seconds to tell a story about a time they were annoyed, blocked or surprised. The facilitator listens for repeated nouns and repeated problems, because two people annoyed by the same thing is a theme worth building on.
6. “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” — Linus Pauling
The line is widely attributed to Pauling, the two-time Nobel laureate, and it captures the arithmetic of divergent thinking: with one idea you are making a decision, and a decision in the first three minutes kills the session.
Most bad brainstorms are not badly facilitated. They are badly sequenced. Evaluation arrives before generation has produced anything to evaluate.
Prompt to run: split the group into pairs, give them five minutes, and require a target number rather than a quality bar. Then read the loudest idea out, wait for the groaning, and remind the room that the groaning is what the last stage was for.
7. “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” — Albert Einstein
Einstein said it in a 1929 interview with the Saturday Evening Post, and the line is less mystical than it sounds. Knowledge tells you what already worked somewhere else. Imagination is what lets you picture the version that does not exist yet.
Knowledge-based sessions produce safe extensions of existing products. If you want something genuinely new in the room, you have to let people describe things that are currently impossible.
Prompt to run: convert the line into a question with a number in it. What would this look like if there were no budget? If the customer had to do it in five seconds? If we had twice the staff and a third of the time? Ask three questions, not one.
8. “Creativity is a way of being alert to the richness and novelty of the world.” — Mary Lou Maycott
This line appears across quote collections credited to Maycott, an educator and author, without a named original text. It is worth keeping for the idea it names: attention is a trainable input, not a mood you either have or do not.
People do not run out of ideas because they lack talent. They run out because they walk through the same commute, the same office and the same conversation every day.
Prompt to run: set a five-minute timer and ask everyone to write down ten details about a space they use daily that they have never noticed. Then build ideas only from that list for the next ten minutes.
9. “The function of creativity is to move knowledge from what you have to what you want.” — unknown
This one also circulates without a confirmed source. It is the most useful definition in the collection for a working session, because it points creativity at a target instead of treating it as decoration.
When a team asks for creative ideas, what they almost always mean is ideas that solve a specific problem for a specific person. Making that explicit removes most of the vagueness that stalls sessions.
Prompt to run: make the group write the problem in one line using this shape: who has trouble doing what, and it costs them what. Every idea that does not address that sentence goes on a separate list.
10. “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” — Steve Jobs
Jobs said it in his 2005 Stanford commencement address, in a section about how you only do good work if you love what you do. He used it to explain how people find their way into work rather than falling into it.
In a brainstorm, care is visible in the output. Teams with no personal stake produce competent ideas, and teams that each have a reason to care produce ideas somebody will actually fight for.
Prompt to run: end the session by going round the table for one sentence each on why this problem matters to you personally. It takes sixty seconds and it changes which idea the room chooses, because the vote stops being abstract.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best creativity quote to open a brainstorm session?
The best opener is a short one that gives the room permission to be unimpressive. Creativity is intelligence having fun, attributed to Albert Einstein, works well because it lowers performance pressure before anyone has written an idea down. Read it in under ten seconds, pause, then move straight into a prompt so the energy lands somewhere instead of evaporating.
How do I use creativity quotes without slowing down a brainstorm?
Use one quote per phase and never more than two per session. Read it, leave a silence of about three seconds, then hand the room a question that the quote raises. A quote followed by silence reads as filler, while a quote followed immediately by a prompt becomes a rule the group applies together.
How can I keep everyone participating in a creative brainstorming session?
Change the unit of participation. Instead of asking for ideas in a room of eight, pair people up and have each pair contribute two ideas every few minutes. Writing in pairs removes the blank board, the eye contact and the fear of being the person who goes first. Collect only at the end of each round.
How should I handle quotes whose author is uncertain?
Say uncertain rather than guessing. Some creativity lines circulate with no traceable original, and two in this collection are marked as such on purpose. If a room asks, tell them the line is widely attributed and not confirmed, then move on. Credibility on a quote page is worth more than a confident guess.
Conclusion
Pick one quote before the session, not during it. Pair it with the matching prompt from this list, give the room ten minutes of unconventional ideas before anyone is allowed to judge one of them, and then choose. That single sequence will carry more of these quotes about creativity for a brainstorm session than a wall of inspiration ever will.
