Top 180 Ken Robinson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

— Ken Robinson

Featured in: Education Quotes, Creativity Quotes, Encouraging Quotes for Students, Individuality Quotes, Inspirational Quotes for Teachers

2. “The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it’s to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they’re valued.”

— Ken Robinson

3. “Most great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth.”

— Ken Robinson

Featured in: Collaboration Quotes, School Quotes

4. “If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?”

— Ken Robinson

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

— Ken Robinson

6. “What you do for yourself dies with you when you leave this world, what you do for others lives on forever.”

— Ken Robinson

7. “Human resources are like natural resources; they’re often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they’re not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.”

— Ken Robinson

8. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

9. “If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance.”

— Ken Robinson

10. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

11. “Imagination is the source of all human achievement.”

— Ken Robinson

12. “Creativity is as important as literacy.”

— Ken Robinson

13. “Every day, everywhere our children spread their dreams beneath our feet and we should tread softly.”

— Ken Robinson

14. “You cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which it will begin to flourish.”

— Ken Robinson

15. “The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student’s education.”

— Ken Robinson

16. “Everyone has huge creative capacities. The challenge is to develop them. A culture of creativity has to involve everybody, not just a select few.”

— Ken Robinson

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

— Ken Robinson

18. “Humans are born curious, creative, and intuitive.”

— Ken Robinson

19. “Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests.”

— Ken Robinson

20. “The first task in teaching for creativity in any field is to encourage people to believe in their creative potential and to nurture the confidence to try.”

— Ken Robinson

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

— Ken Robinson

22. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

23. “Education doesn’t need to be reformed- it needs to be transformed.”

— Ken Robinson

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

— Ken Robinson

25. “It’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp.”

— Ken Robinson

26. “All kids have tremendous talents – and we squander them pretty ruthlessly.”

— Ken Robinson

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

— Ken Robinson

28. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

29. “The dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn’t count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don’t enjoy it, who don’t get any real benefit from it.”

— Ken Robinson

30. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

31. “Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.”

— Ken Robinson

32. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

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

— Ken Robinson

34. “You can think of creativity as applied imagination.”

— Ken Robinson

35. “Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects: at the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts.”

— Ken Robinson

36. “Creativity is the greatest gift of human intelligence.”

— Ken Robinson

37. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

38. “The answer is not to standardize education, but to personalize and customize it to the needs of each child and community. There is no alternative. There never was.”

— Ken Robinson

39. “The most powerful method of improving education is to invest in the improvement of teaching and the status of great teachers.”

— Ken Robinson

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

— Ken Robinson

41. “You can’t just give someone a creativity injection. You have to create an environment for curiosity and a way to encourage people and get the best out of them.”

— Ken Robinson

42. “You can’t be a creative thinker if you’re not stimulating your mind, just as you can’t be an Olympic athlete if you don’t train regularly.”

— Ken Robinson

43. “To be creative you actually have to do something.”

— Ken Robinson

44. “When you’re in your Element, your sense of time changes. If you’re doing something that you love, an hour can feel like five minutes; if you are doing something that you do not, five minutes can feel like an hour.”

— Ken Robinson

45. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

46. “Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent not a singular conception of ability. and at the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and intelligence.”

— Ken Robinson

47. “Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

— Ken Robinson

48. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

49. “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?”

— Ken Robinson

50. “Teaching for creativity involves teaching creatively. There are three related tasks in teaching for creativity: encouraging, identifying and fostering.”

— Ken Robinson