Joseph Beuys Quotes

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

Creative people do not belong in the university because the process is antithetical to the analytical process so necessary for proper scholarship.

It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better.

The disobedient child is continuously condemned. The obedient child is, on the other hand, continuously praised. But have you heard of any obedient child having become world-famous in any dimension of creativity? Have you heard of any obedient child who has attained the Nobel prize for anything - literature, peace, science? The obedient child becomes just the common crowd. All that is added to existence is added by the disobedient.

Invention requires both disciplines, strict common sense and wild imagination.

See what no one else sees. See what everyone chooses not to see... out of fear, conformity or laziness. See the whole world anew each day!

The great challenge which faces us is to assure that, in our society of big-ness, we do not strangle the voice of creativity, that the rules of the game do not come to overshadow its purpose, that the grand orchestration of society leaves ample room for the man who marches to the music of another drummer.

Exercise your imagination muscle! How many uses can you come up with for a flowerpot? Write down your answers. But don't write them in this book. Grab a separate sheet of paper. I didn't spend two and a half weeks writing a book just so you could mark up the pages with your silly ideas for things you can do with a flowerpot. When it comes down to it, what's wrong with a flowerpot not being a flowerpot? Why is nothing ever good enough for you?

A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else.

Conformists die, but heretics live forever.

All art is based on non-conformity.

Ideation is not a synonym for innovation, conformity is not its simple antonym, and innovation is not the automatic consequence of "creative thinking.".

You could reason with someone who was halfway educated and appeal to his intelligence, but I felt helpless in the face of utter stupidity.

The world in general disapproves of creativity, and to be creative in public is particularly bad. Even to speculate in public is rather worrisome.

If you can't solve a problem, it's because you're playing by the rules

No matter how efficient school training may be, it would only produce stagnation, orthodoxy, and rigid pedantry if there were no uncommon men pushing forward beyond the wisdom of their tutors.

The business community wants remarkable advertising, but turns a cold shoulder to the kind of people who can produce it. That is why most advertisements are so infernally dull.... our business needs massive transfusions of talent. And talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. And measuring originality by deviation from the mass breeds eccentricity in them.

There should be a dash of the amateur in criticism. For the amateur is a man of enthusiasm who has not settled down and is not habit bound.

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.

Imitators are but a servile kind of cattle.

If you're not upsetting idiots, you might be an idiot.

You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.

The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.