Top 180 Ken Robinson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it’s produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.”

— Ken Robinson

52. “The quest for your Element is really a two-way journey. It is an inward journey to explore what lies within you; it is an outward journey to explore opportunities in the world around you.”

— Ken Robinson

53. “The task of education is not to teach subjects: it is to teach students.”

— Ken Robinson

54. “Some dreams truly are ‘impossible dreams.’ However, many aren’t. Knowing the difference is often one of the first steps to finding your element, because if you can see the chances of making a dream come true, you can also likely see the necessary next steps you need to take toward achieving it.”

— Ken Robinson

55. “One Size Does Not Fit All Some of the most brilliant, creative people I know did not do well at school. Many of them didn’t really discover what they could do – and who they really were – until they’d left school and recovered from their education.”

— Ken Robinson

56. “We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. For the most part, we use only a fraction of these powers, and some not at all.”

— Ken Robinson

57. “For most of us the problem isn’t that we aim too high and fail – it’s just the opposite – we aim too low and succeed.”

— Ken Robinson

58. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

59. “As I see it, the aims of education are to enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens.”

— Ken Robinson

60. “Education is not a linear process of preparation for the future: it is about cultivating the talents and sensibilities through which we can live our best lives in the present and create the best futures for us all.”

— Ken Robinson

61. “You can be creative in anything – in math, science, engineering, philosophy – as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.”

— Ken Robinson

62. “Languages are the bearers of the cultural genes. As we learn a language, accents, and ways of speaking, we also learn ways of thinking, feeling, and relating.”

— Ken Robinson

63. “The Element is the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion.”

— Ken Robinson

64. “The dominant Western worldview is not based on seeing synergies and connections but on making distinctions and seeing differences.”

— Ken Robinson

65. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

66. “Creativity is a process more often than it is an event.”

— Ken Robinson

67. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

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

— Ken Robinson

69. “Human intelligence is richer and more dynamic than we have been led to believe by formal academic education.”

— Ken Robinson

70. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

71. “Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”

— Ken Robinson

72. “The word amateur derives from the Latin word amator, which means lover, devoted friend, or someone who is in avid pursuit of an objective. In the original sense, an amateur is someone who does something for the love of it.”

— Ken Robinson

73. “It is difficult to feel accomplished when you’re not accomplishing something that matters to you. Doing something ‘for your own good’ is rarely for your own good if it causes you to be less than who you really are.”

— Ken Robinson

74. “Passion is the driver of achievement in all fields. Some people love doing things they don’t feel they’re good at. That may be because they underestimate their talents or haven’t yet put the work in to develop them.”

— Ken Robinson

75. “If you are considering earning your living from your Element, it’s important to bear in mind that you not only have to love what you do; you should also enjoy the culture and the tribes that go with it.”

— Ken Robinson

76. “When people are in their Element, they connect with something fundamental to their sense of identity, purpose, and well-being.”

— Ken Robinson

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

— Ken Robinson

78. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

79. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

80. “When children aren’t given the space to struggle through things on their own, they don’t learn to problem-solve very well. They don’t learn to be confident in their own abilities, and it can affect their self-esteem.”

— Ken Robinson

81. “If you’re running an engineering or finance company, all companies depend on ideas and ingenuity. I think the principles of creative leadership apply everywhere, whether it’s an advertising company or whether you’re running a hospital.”

— Ken Robinson

82. “Finding the medium that excites your imagination, that you love to play with and work in, is an important step to freeing your creative energies.”

— Ken Robinson

83. “Research indicates that, as long as we keep using our brains in an active way, we continue to build neural pathways as we get older. This gives us not only the ongoing potential for creative thought, but also an additional incentive for continuing to stretch ourselves.”

— Ken Robinson

84. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

85. “One of the enemies of creativity and innovation, especially in relation to our own development, is common sense.”

— Ken Robinson

86. “The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive.”

— Ken Robinson

87. “If all you had was academic ability, you wouldn’t have been able to get out of bed this morning. In fact, there wouldn’t have been a bad to get out of. No one could have made one. You could have written about possibility of one, but not have constructed it.”

— Ken Robinson

88. “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: ‘Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician. Don’t do art, you won’t be an artist.’ Benign advice – now, profoundly mistaken.”

— Ken Robinson

89. “Being wrong doesn’t mean being creative – but if you aren’t afraid of being wrong, you can’t be creative.”

— Ken Robinson

90. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

91. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

92. “Dr. Henry Lodge, coauthor of Younger Next Year, makes the point sharply. “It turns out,” he says, “that 70% of American aging is not real aging. It’s just decay. It’s rot from the stuff that we do.”

— Ken Robinson

93. “Compassion is more than empathy; it is the living expression of the Golden Rule, to treat others as you would have them treat you. Compassion is the practice of empathy.”

— Ken Robinson

94. “One of the strongest signs of being in the zone is a sense of freedom and of authenticity.”

— Ken Robinson

95. “A three-year-old is not half a six-year-old.”

— Ken Robinson

96. “Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it’s the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.”

— Ken Robinson

97. “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.”

— Ken Robinson

98. “Communication is not only about words and numbers. Some thoughts can’t be properly expressed in these ways at all. We also think in sounds and images, in movement and gesture, which gives rise to our capacities for music, visual arts, dance, and theater in all their variations.”

— Ken Robinson

99. “Too many people never connect with their true talents and therefore don’t know what they are capable of achieving.”

— Ken Robinson

100. “If you’re doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes. If you’re doing something that doesn’t resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour.”

— Ken Robinson