Usually the wacky people have the breakthroughs. The 'smart' people don't.
The truly creative people tend to be outliers.
We need men who can dream of things that never were.
Creative people are like a wet towel You wring them out and pick up another one.
Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool age on, throughout life?
I believe there are Steve Jobses all around us. Really, what is happening is that they're being edited out of importance.
I’ve always been interested in leaders and rule breakers and artists and politicians.
We need our radicals.
The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion - in the long run, these are the only people who count.
It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.
The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind - creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers.
Aquarius[es] are social butterflies, humanitarians, geniuses: Einstein was one.
New ideas for innovation grow out of the minds of each new generation. Having an institution of higher learning that can help young people put those ideas into action is critical.
Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates - but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.
The greatest inventors are unknown to us. Someone invented the wheel - but who?
What I notice about people who are gifted in filmmaking is that they're great thinkers. They engage with big ideas and they engage with people.
There has never been any great genius without a spice of madness.
Most geniuses are weird.
If you deeply appreciate and love what creative people do and how they think, which is usually in unpredictable and irrational ways, then you can start to understand them. And finally, you can see inside their minds and DNA.
It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him, and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.
Geniuses are like ocean liners: they should never meet.
I like to move among painters, mathematicians, psychologists, people who can tell me something.
It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple.
Nine tenths of modern science is in this respect the same: it is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers - who were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them - who, as the proverb went, 'walked into a well from looking at the stars' - who were believed to be useless, if anyone could be such.
Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call sages, and those who act upon it, we call artists.
