Ken Robinson Quotes

We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.

Curiosity is the engine of achievement.

You can be creative in anything - in math, science, engineering, philosophy - as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.

The gardener does not make a plant grow. The job of a gardener is to create optimal conditions for growth

Change what you are doing; change your world. And if enough people do that, we can change the world.

Imagination is the source of all human achievement.

Sometimes getting away from school is the best thing that can happen to a great mind.

You don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? He was seven at some point. He was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he? How annoying would that be?

In a world where lifelong employment in the same job is a thing of the past, creativity is not a luxury. It is essential for personal security and fulfillment.

What we become as our lives evolve depends on the quality of our experiences here and now.

Teaching for creativity aims to encourage self-confidence, independence of mind, and the capacity to think for oneself.

All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities.

Human life is inherently creative. It's why we all have different résumés. … It's why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic.

Creativity is a process more often than it is an event.

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

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our concept of the richness in human capacity.

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

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.

We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

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

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

A three-year-old is not half a six-year-old.

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.

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

I mean, really, whatever you woke up worrying about this morning, get over it. How important in the greater scheme of things can it possibly be? Make your peace and move on.

These powers of imagination and creativity are among the few things that set us apart from the rest of life on Earth. But they make all the difference.

The Element is about discovering your self, and you can't do this if you're trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can't be yourself in a swarm.

Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it's produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.

Humans are born curious, creative, and intuitive.

Education doesn't need to be reformed- it needs to be transformed.

Transforming education is not easy but the price of failure is more than we can afford, while the benefits of success are more than we can imagine.

Most people didn't pursue their passions simply because of the promise of a paycheck. They pursued them because they couldn't imagine doing anything else with their lives.

You can think of creativity as applied imagination.

Make the most of whatever it is that floats your boat.

To be creative you actually have to do something.

Very often, organizations are inflexible because there is too little communication between functions; they are too segregated.

Imagination is the primary gift of human consciousness.

The more alive we feel, the more we can contribute to the lives of others.

Creativity, as I see it, is the process of putting your imagination to work. It's been defined rather simply as applied imagination. That's not a bad way to think about it.

Finding your element is essential to your wellbeing and ultimate success and, by implication to the health of our organisations and the effectiveness of our educational systems

Far more than any other power, imagination is what sets human beings apart from every other species on earth.

We get educated out of creativity.

Typically [professors] live in their heads. … They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. It’s a way of getting their head to meetings.

There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why?

I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life.

Whatever your aptitudes, the greatest source of achievement is passion. Aptitude matters, but passion often matters more… If you love doing something, you’ll be constantly drawn to get better at it.

Revolutions are defined not only by the ideas that drive them but by the scale of their impact.

The gardener does not make a plant grow. The job of a gardener is to create optimal conditions.

The point is not to be the best, but to be the best you can be.

Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler did not solve an old problem, they asked a new question, and in doing so they changed the whole basis on which the old questions had been framed.