Commitment

The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become. –Charles Dubois

The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work.  Hard work is the price we must pay for success.  I think you can accomplish anything if you're willing to pay the price. –Vince Lombardi

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen. –Frank Lloyd Wright

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. –Thomas Jefferson

Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish. –John Quincy Adams

Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal: my strength lies solely in my tenacity. –Louis Pasteur

There are no gains without pains. –Ben Franklin

The best way out is always through. –Robert Frost

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing. –John Powell

Creativity

Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams - day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain-machinery whizzing - are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization. -L. Frank Baum

The key question isn't "What fosters creativity?"  But it is “Why in God's name isn't everyone creative?”  Where was the human potential lost?  How was it crippled?  I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create?  But why do people not create or innovate?  We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything. –Abraham Maslow

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere. –Carl Sagan

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all. –Edward de Bono

The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away. –Linus Pauling

Imagination is more important than knowledge.  For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create. –AE

Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception. –Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. –Erich Fromm

Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. –William James

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination. –John Dewey

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. –Victor Hugo

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants. –Isaac Newton

Discovery

There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. -Isaac Asimov

A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones. -Abraham Lincoln

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. -Bertrand Russell

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. -Andre Gide

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust

Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought. -Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess. -Isaac Newton

The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike. -Jacob Bronkowski

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance. -Albert Einstein

I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that this delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it. I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes. There the snow lay around my doorstep — great heaps of protons quietly precessing in the earth's magnetic field. To see the world for a moment as something rich and strange is the private reward of many a discovery. -Edward M. Purcell

I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries. -M. Curie