Pablo Picasso on Creativity, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

This quote by Pablo Picasso was a favorite of Steve Jobs who said he “stole” the concept of the Macintosh computer from a similar device that was shown to him at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center.

Many a creative genius have made similar statements (see below) about “stealing” ideas including Newton, Albert Einstein, Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and others.

However to “steal” or borrow others ideas you have to see them, and this means increasing your powers of observation. Go to Starbucks to Learn the Creative Power of Observation.

As you can see in the the following two examples from Picasso, stealing really means taking something as a starting point, then using your creativity to transform it and synthesize it into something new.

You can learn other creative tricks by watching the TEDxSedona titled, “Creativity is the #1 Skill to Survive in the 21st Century.”

Left image: “L’infante Marie Marguerite (1653)”, by Velazquez. Right image: “L’infante Marie Marguerite (1957)” by Picasso. Translation: “The infant”

Left image: African mask viewed by Picasso in Paris (1906). Right image: “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)” by Picasso. Translation: “The Ladies of Avignon”

Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

The lesson here is that we all should stand on the shoulders of giants by using our passion to absorb everything there is to know about a subject, then use our creative powers to advance the cutting edge.

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources,”  Albert Einstein

“I’m a thief, and am not ashamed. I steal from the best wherever it happens to be,” Martha Graham

Hemingway said, “It would take a day to list everyone I borrowed ideas from, and it was no new thing for me to learn from everyone I could, living or dead. I learn as much from painters about how to write as I do from writers.”

T.S. Eliot said, “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.”

Wilson Mizner (screenwriter) said, “If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism, and if you steal from many, it’s research.”