Creating Minds Quotes

“When Einstein had thought through a problem, he always found it necessary to formulate this subject in as many different ways as possible and to present it so that it would be comprehensible to people accustomed to different modes of thought and with different educational preparations.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“And Einstein stood out among natural scientists in his abiding curiosity about children's minds. He had once declared that we know all the physics that we will ever need to know by the age of three.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“Einstein was remarkable for his powers of concentration; he could work uninterruptedly for hours and even days on the same problem. Some of the topics that interested him remained on his mind for decades. For relaxation he turned to music and to sailing, but often his work would continue during these moments as well; he usually had a notebook in his pocket so that he could jot down any idea that came to him. Once, after the theory of relativity had been put forth, he confessed to his colleague Wolfgang Pauli, "For the rest of my life I want to reflect on what light is." It is perhaps not entirely an accident that a focus on light is also the first visual act of the newborn child.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“Einstein did not seek loneliness, but unlike Freud, he did not find it a threat. He was quite happy to be on his own from earliest life and did not crave companionship. This lack of craving for another person may well explain why neither of his marriages was a success and why his relations to his two sons were also unsatisfactory. In working out problems, Einstein once recalled, "I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of quiet life stimulates the creative mind." He went on to comment, with some nostalgia: "There are certain callings in our modern organization which entail such an isolated life without making a great claim on bodily and intellectual effort. I think of such occupations as the service [sic] in lighthouses and lightships.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“He knows everything but he lacks inexperience.”
― Howard E. Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, G

“Jean Monnet: “I regard every defeat as an opportunity.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, G

“By introducing these elements at the outset, I wish to stress that all creative activity grows, first, out of the relationships between an individual and the objective world of work and, second, out of the ties between an individual and other human beings.”
― Howard E. Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, G

“My passionate interest in social justice and social responsibility has always stood in curious contrast to a marked lack of desire for direct association with men and women. I am a horse for single harness, not cut out for tandem or team work....Such isolation is sometimes bitter but I do not regret being cut off from the understanding and sympathy of other men....I am compensated for it in being rendered independent of the customs, opinions and prejudices of others and am not tempted to rest my piece of mind upon such shifting foundations.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“It cannot be overstated that the emphasis on visual thinking among German-speaking scientists and engineers circa 1900 was widespread. Yet in 1905 it was Einstein who combined visual thinking with Gedanken experiments and quasiaesthetic notions with dazzling results.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“Einstein felt that he did not have great mathematical gifts and deliberately chose not to take courses and to continue in that area.

The fact that I neglected mathematics to a certain extent had its causes not merely in my stronger interest in science than in mathematics but also in the following strange experience....I saw that mathematics was split up into numerous specialties, each of which could easily absorb the short lifetime granted to us....In physics, however, I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things that clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential.

This capacity to pick out important issues dovetailed with Einstein's search for the most general possible conception. "In a man of my type," he declared, "the turning point of the development lies in the fact that gradually the major interest disengages itself to a far reaching degree from the momentary and the merely personal and turns toward the striving for a mental grasp of things.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“I think that physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up and they keep their curiosity. Once you are sophisticated, you know too much-far too much.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“In his history of the psychoanalytic movement, Freud recalled: "When I look back to those lonely years, away from the pressure and preoccupations of today, it seems to me like a glorious 'heroic era'; my 'splendid isolation' was not lacking in advantages and in charms." It is striking that one encounter virtually the same words and affects-the heights and the depths- in the recollections of other innovators as they reflect on their subjective state on the eve of their greatest breakthroughs.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“During an individual's immersion in a domain, the locus of flow experiences shifts: what was once too challenging becomes attainable and even pleasurable, while what has long since become attainable no longer proves engaging. Thus, the journeyman musical performer gains flow from the accurate performance of familiar pieces in the repertoire; the youthful master wishes to tackle the most challenging pieces, ones most difficult to execute in a technical sense; the seasoned master may develop highly personal interpretations of familiar pieces, or, alternatively, return to those deceptively simple pieces that may actually prove difficult to execute convincingly and powerfully. Such an analysis helps explain why creative individuals continue to engage in the area of their expertise despite its frustrations, and why so many of them continue to raise the ante, posing ever-greater challenges for themselves, even at the risk of sacrificing the customary rewards.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“Embracing a different vocabulary, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has described a highly sought-after affective state called the flow state or flow experience. In such intrinsically motivating experiences, which can occur in any domain of activity, people report themselves as fully engaged with and absorbed by the object of their attention. In one sense, those "in flow" are not conscious of the experience at the moment; on reflection, however, such people feel that they have been fully alive, totally realized, and involved in a "peak experience." Individuals who regularly engage in creative activities often report that they seek such states; the prospect of such "periods of flow" can be so intense that individuals will exert considerable practice and effort, and even tolerate physical or psychological pain, in pursuit thereof. Committed writers may claim that they hate the time spent chained to their desks, but the thought that they would not have the opportunity to attain occasional periods of flow while writing proves devastating.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“Indeed, knowledge that one will be judged on some criterion of "creativeness" or "originality" tends to narrow the scope of what one can produce (leading to products that are then judged as relatively conventional); in contrast, the absence of an evaluations seems to liberate creativity.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“Freud's convictions about the importance of infantile developments also colored his view of creative activity. Freud was impressed by the parallels between the child at play, the adult daydreamer, and the creative artist. As he once phrased it:

Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?....The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously-that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion-while separating it sharply from reality.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“Gruber speaks of an "evolving systems" approach to the study of creativity: that is, one monitors simultaneously the organization of knowledge in a domain, the purpose(s) pursued by the creator, and the affective experiences he or she undergoes. While these systems are only "loosely coupled," their interaction over time helps one understand the ebb and flow of creative activity over the course of a productive human life.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“As David Feldman has shown, the prodigy must exhibit promise in an area that is valued by the culture and in which children’s relevant behaviors are at least noticed. If graphic expression is not valued in a culture, if children’s scribbles are routinely disregarded and discarded, there will be no drawing prodigies. By the same token, when a culture begins to attend to children’s precocious performances in a domain—as has happened with visual artistry in contemporary China—one may discover unexpected gifts.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“Berlin suggests that "in the case of seminal discoveries-say of imaginary numbers, or non-Euclidean geometry, or the quantum theory- it is precisely dissociation of categories indispensable to normal human experience, that seems to be required, namely a gift of conceiving of what cannot in principle be imagined nor expressed in ordinary language." Like Newton and Copernicus, Einstein sustained a vision of a unified, harmonious, physically caused world. This dissociation led both to Einstein's genius in the world of physics and his inspirational, but ultimately less successful, forays into issues of world order.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“Einstein's breakthrough was classic in that it sought to unify the elements of a physical analysis, and it placed the older examples and principles within a broader framework. But it was revolutionary in that, ever afterward, we have thought differently about space and time, matter and energy. Space and time-no more absolute-have become forms of intuition that cannot be divorced from perspective or consciousness, anymore than can the colors of the world or the length of a shadow. As the philosopher Ernst Cassirer commented, in relativity, the conception of constancy and absoluteness of the elements is abandoned to give permanence and necessity to the laws instead.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“Between the conception of the idea of this special relativity theory and the completion of the corresponding publication, there elapsed five or six weeks. But it would be hardly correct to consider this as a birth date, because earlier the arguments and building blocks were being prepared over a period of years, although without bringing about the fundamental decision.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“What is true of physics at its best may pertain as well to papers about physics. It is only on the surface, suggests Gerald Holton, that Einstein's papers of 1905 appear disparate. Three epochal papers, written but eight weeks apart, seem to occupy entirely different fields of physics: an interpretation of light as composed of quanta of energy; an explanation of Brownian motion that supports the notion of the atomic nature of matter; and the introduction of the "principle of relativity," which reconfigured our understanding of physical space and time. However, Holton idicates that all three papers arise from the same general problem-fluctuations in the pressure of radiation. Holton also notes a striking parallel in the style of the papers. Einstein begins each with a statement of a formal asymmetry, eliminates redundancy, and leads to one or more empirical predictions.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“all our knowledge, both of time and space, is essentially relative....Position we must evidently acknowledge to be relative, for we cannot describe the position of a body in any terms which do not express relation....There are no landmarks in space; one portion of space is exactly like every other portion....We are, as it were, on an unruffled sea.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“Thanks to his own thought experiments, his formal education, and his study of authors like Foppl, Einstein already had identified the set of issues that would occupy him for years to come: the relation between electricity and magnetism, the putative role of the ether, and conceptions of space and time, as formulated by a philosopher like Kant or a scientific thinker like Maxwell. Einstein later recalled:

What made the greatest impression upon the student, however, was less the technical construction of mechanics or the solution of complicated problems than the achievements of mechanics in areas which apparently had nothing to do with mechanics: the mechanical theory of light, which conceived of light as the wave-motion of a quasi-rigid elastic ether and above all the kinetic theory of gases.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“The third organizing theme focuses on the relationship between the creator and work in a domain. Early in life, the creator generally discovers an area or object of interest that is consuming. At first the creator seeks to master work in that domain in the manner of others working within the culture; increasingly, however, the very relationship to the domain becomes problematic. The individual then, willingly or unwillingly, feels constrained to try inventing a new symbol system-a system of meaning-that is adequate to the chosen problems or themes and that can eventually make sense to others as well. In each chapter I examine in detail the ways in which a creator forges a new system of meaning in a distinctive domain; it turns out that surprising commonalities hold across the domains as well.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“In a typical approach, historiometric investigators like Simonton review large bodies of data to determine the decade of life in which creative individuals are most productive. Such studies have led to the findings that maximal productivity typically occurs between ages thrity-five and thirty-nine, but that profiles differ appreciably across disparate domains of knowledge: thus, poets and mathematicians reach an apogee in their twenties or thirties, while historians or philosophers may peak decades later.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi

“Having demonstrated the importance of sexuality in motivating human behavior in general, Freud called attention to the sexual factors that undergird a creative life. In Freud's view, creative individuals are inclined (or compelled) to sublimate much of their libidinal energy into "secondary" pursuits, such as writing, drawing, composing, or investigating scientific puzzles. He would have found many data of interest in the seven cases presented here.”
― Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi