These are 50 of my favorite innovation quotes to help get you into an innovation mindset. Use these quotes to build motivation to be innovative, respond to change, and take action on your new ideas! Just click through the slideshow below. This collection of quotes is a part of my new eBook and my Innovation Mindset online workshop. I used this app to design the quote images you will see.
50 Innovation Quotes to be Innovative & Action Oriented
Quotes have been inspiring for me throughout my career. They make living, change making, and the work of innovation more epic and connect us to a larger history. They motivate.
I’ve had the idea of creating a quote collection for years. I started collecting quotes and sharing them as “door decks” when I was a resident assistant at a residence hall in college! I even started a book of my favorite quotes, but never launched it until now. It was an idea stuck in development years ago…a personal passion project. Ideas that we have that are stuck in development can still get developed further when an opportunity comes along.
Recently I had wanted to build an innovation quote image book. Now I am finally doing it. The little spark that reignited my passion for this idea was simple and unusual. My friend Shawn sent me a text message that he was painting part of his house this weekend. His text message made me think of a Van Gogh quote (the one you see in the slideshow), which I found and shared with him. This reminded me of my interest and passion for innovation quotes and motivational quotes. I was on fire from there creating a keynote slide presentation and pdf prototype! Inspiration often comes from unusual sources and the mind makes connections!
The bigger motivation for me to put the time into building this (from a favorite Madison coffeeshop over the weekend) was threefold. I’m currently building a mindset online workshop, working on a keynote presentation on Learning to Innovate (Innovation Mindset), and creating a larger course for a university. I wanted another useful tool for helping people get into the innovation mindset. So my innovation quotes idea has application and users now! I find myself more motivated to put in the time to develop something when I know it has people waiting for it.
These are some of my favorite innovation quotations. What are your favorites? Please add some of your favorites to my list in the comments. What are 10 quotes that will motivate you? Reflect on them now and then to sustain the motivation. This is epic work! Do a quote burst. What are some of your favorite quotes for the motivation, psychology, mindset, or action inspiration to innovate in your life or work?
Innovation Quotes List
“Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.”
– George Addair
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
– African Proverb
“Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
– Woody Allen
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
– Maya Angelou
“To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.”
– Aristotle
“The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.”
– Mary Catherine Bateson
“When we really pay attention, everything is your teacher.”
– Ezra Bayda
“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.“
– Brene Brown
“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.”
– Leonardo da Vinci
“There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.”
– Peter Drucker
“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.”
– Peter Drucker
“Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.”
– Peter Drucker
“What gets measured gets improved.”
– Peter Drucker
“An idea is a new combination of old elements.”
– Gordon Drydon
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
– Thomas Edison
“Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.”
– Thomas A. Edison
“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”
– Albert Einstein
“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
– Benjamin Franklin
“Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.”
– Judy Garland
“Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.”
– Tom Goodwin
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
– Wayne Gretzky
“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
– Wayne Gretzky
“Lots of people know a good thing the moment the other fellow sees it first.”
– Job E. Hodges
“The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
“If you want a quality, act as if you already had it. Try the “as if” technique.”
– William James
“Fall seven times, stand up eight.”
– Japanese Proverb
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
– Steve Jobs
“How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.”
– Elizabeth Lesser
“You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.”
– Jack London
“Many a man fails because he never tries.”
– Norman MacEwan
“Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.”
– Joshua J. Marine
“Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.”
– Robert McKee
“The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”
– Dan Millman (Way of the Peaceful Warrior)
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
– Pablo Picasso
“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”
– Tony Robbins
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look fear in the face.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
– Theodore Roosevelt
“Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.”
– Babe Ruth
“If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.”
– Sheryl Sandberg
“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.”
– William Shakespeare
“Be great in act, as you have been in thought.”
– William Shakespeare
“You see things and you say ‘Why?’; but I dream things that never were and I say ‘Why not?'”
– George Bernard Shaw
“A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.”
– William Shedd
“Let him that would move the world, first move himself.”
– Socrates
“One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”
– Vincent Van Gogh
“For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been!'”
– John Greenleaf Whittier
“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”
– E.O. Wilson
“I think I need to keep being creative not to prove anything but because it makes me happy just to do it… I think trying to be creative, keeping busy, has a lot to do with keeping you alive.”
– Willie Nelson
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
– John F. Kennedy
Innovation Quotes
Please comment with some of your favorite innovation quotes! You can also go deeper with innovation online courses, design thinking training, or innovation workshops!
Here are some other quote lists you might take inspiration from.
Design Thinking Quotes for Creativity
Reflection Quotes for Growth, Mindset and Motivation
Innovation Training Quotes
Quotes about the Power of Storytelling (for Leaders, Education & Business)