Ken Robinson Quotes

Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play.

There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers. Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools.

Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of.

Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value - more often than not, comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things

Up to a point you welcome being interrupted because it is only by interacting with other people that you get anything interesting done.

Innovation is applied creativity. By definition, innovation is always about introducing something new, or improved, or both and it is usually assumed to be a positive thing.

I believe this passionately: that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.

Humans are born curious, creative, and intuitive.

To be creative you actually have to do something.

Our task is to educate our children's whole being so they can face the future and make something of it. To achieve this we need to balance education for careers with education for twenty-first century life.

When my son, James, was doing homework for school, he would have five or six windows open on his computer, Instant Messenger was flashing continuously, his cell phone was constantly ringing, and he was downloading music and watching the TV over his shoulder. I don’t know if he was doing any homework, but he was running an empire as far as I could see, so I didn’t really care.

To improve our schools, we have to humanize them and make education personal to every student and teacher in the system. Education is always about relationships. Great teachers are not just instructors and test administrators: They are mentors, coaches, motivators, and lifelong sources of inspiration to their students.

Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not — because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.

Private imaginings may have no outcomes in the world at all. Creativity does. Being creative involves doing something.

We think about the world in all ways we experience it ; we think visually, we think in sign, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract term, we think in movement. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.

My contention is, all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.

Creativity is as important as literacy and numeracy, and I actually think people understand that creativity is important - they just don't understand what it is.

Curiosity is the engine of achievement.

Creativity involves putting your imagination to work. In a sense, creativity is applied imagination.

All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think.

Life is not linear, it is organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help create for us

You were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid - things you liked - on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don’t do music. You’re not going to be a musician. Don’t do art. You're not going to be an artist - benign advice, now profoundly mistaken.

One way of opening ourselves up to new opportunities is to make conscious efforts to look differently at our ordinary situations. Doing so allows a person to see the world as one rife with possibility and to take advantage of some of those possibilities if they seem worth pursuing.

We live in worlds that we have forged and composed. It's much more true than any of the species that you see. I mean, it seems to me that one of the most distinctive features of human intelligence is the capacity to imagine, to project out of our own immediate circumstances and to bring to mind things that aren't present here and now.

It's not what happens to us that makes the difference in our lives. What makes the difference is our attitude towards what happens. The idea of luck is a powerful way of illustrating the importance of our basic attitudes in affecting whether or not we find our Element.