Limitation fosters creativity

• Limitation spawns creativity. Alec Soth
• But out of limitations comes creativity. Debbie Allen
• Out of limitations, new forms emerge  Georges Braque
• Limitation is the source of creativity. Muzaf Ahmad
• Creativity can flourish within sensible financial limitations. Michael Eisner
• Creativity starts when you cut a zero from your budget. Jaime Lerner
• Our borders and our obstacles can only do two things: stop us in our tracks or force us to get creative.  Amy Purdy
• Limitation makes the creative mind inventive. Walter Gropius
• The imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles. Jonah Lehrer
• What appears to us as limitation is actually a natural and necessary result of the expression of creative freedom. Bernardo Kastrup
• I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.  Jeff Bezos
• When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl. T.S. Eliot
• Limitations are essential because they give us a starting point and a shape to work against. Shane Parrish
• Creativity is a double-edged sword. Creativity in any endeavor requires a mind open to thinking differently. Creativity also requires restriction to thrive. One without the other will cause creativity to wither. Howard Ibach
• Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem. Rollo May
• The principle of Creative Limitations calls for freedom within a circle of obstacles and restricted boundaries. Talent is like a muscle: without something to push against, it atrophies. So we deliberately put obstacles in our path – barriers that will inspire us. We disciple ourselves as to what to do, while we’re boundless as to how to do it. Robert McKee
• Many articles and books on creativity encourage us to ‘think out of the box’ and get rid of all the restrictions on our thinking. The trouble with this advice is that it is almost entirely wrong. It is very difficult to be creative when ‘anything goes’ and you have no limitations, because it is the limitations that actually encourage creativity. Mark Forster
• Creativity is not simply originality and unlimited freedom. There is much more to it than that. Creativity also imposes restrictions. While it uses methods other than those of ordinary thinking, it must not be in disagreement with ordinary thinking-or rather, it must be something that, sooner or later, ordinary thinking will understand, accept, and appreciate. Otherwise the result would be bizarre, not creative. Silvano Arieti
• Where resources are plentiful (i.e. no constraints), you will find very little creativity. Where resources are scarce (i.e. many constraints), you will find an abundance of creativity. Andy Murray
• This is one of my favorites. People think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their way out of that little box: ‘We know you said it was impossible, but we’re going to do this, this, and that to get us there.’ Marissa Mayer
• Often, self-imposed constraints, or boundaries, force you to think differently about challenges, leading to more practical ideas and innovations. Instead of thinking ‘outside the box’ and looking in every possible direction, get inside one box – a specific problem that needs a resolution, a smaller space where big changes can be made, etc. – and focus your creative attention on making a difference. Marc and Angel Chernoff
• Embrace limits: There can be no creativity without limits. Sounds strange, but limits are the cause and reason of creativity. Infinite choice is paralyzing; limits give us something to work with — or against — so we can at least get started. Dustin Wax

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Limitation causes art to thrive

• Most great art is freedom within form. Donald Miller
• Out of limitations, new forms emerge. Georges Braque
• Complete freedom debilitates art. Walter Darby Bannard
• Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom. Michelangelo
• Limitation makes the creative mind inventive. Walter Gropius
• The enemy of art is the absence of limitations. Orson Welles
• I don’t think an artist does well without limitations. Hillman Curtis
• I’ve found that limitations can be an artist’s best friend sometimes.  Michael Gungor
• Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them. Flannery O’Connor
• Economy is essential to all good art. Jerry Seinfeld
• I think that limitations are the most important part of any art form. Lars von Trier
• In art, progress lies not in an extension, but in a knowledge of limitations. Georges Braque
• A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations. Gerald Jampolsky
• Perhaps art is simply an organism’s reaction against its retentive limitations. Joseph Brodsky
• Progress in art does not consist in reducing limitations, but in knowing them better. Georges Braque
• Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. Gilbert K. Chesterton
• Artists are perennially implored to consider ‘the limitations of the medium. Walter J. Phillips
• Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium. Henri Matisse
• Learn to view limitations not as annoyances but as welcome editors that force you to think creatively. Garr Reynolds
• It is the limitation of means that determines style, gives rise to new forms and makes creativity possible. Georges Braque
• Being an art form, verse cannot be free” in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle. William Carlos Williams
• Limitations can be hugely creative and hugely inspiring – so long as they are the ones you choose for yourself. Patrick Ness
• The fewer limitations the artist imposes on his work, the less chance he has for artistic success.  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• The realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art. Roland Barthes
• Limitation of means is a precondition of excellence. Creative freedom chooses its limitations. Destructive freedom rejects them heedlessly. Walter Darby Bannard
• But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. Alfred North Whitehead
• The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively–because, without this humble appliance, you don’t know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. Frank Zappa
• When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations. Sol LeWitt
• Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. Gilbert K. Chesterton
• I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it. Federico Fellini
• Every artist knows that there is no such thing as “freedom” in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion. Willa Cather
• To achieve great things we must be self-confined…mastery is revealed in limitation.  Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
• Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. G.K. Chesterton