George Lois Quotes

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.

You can be cautious or you can be creative, but there’s no such thing as a Cautious Creative.

To create great work, here's how you must spend your time: 1% Inspiration 9% Perspiration 90% Justification

The more creative you are the more trouble you're in. You have to be courageous!

Advertising is poison gas. It should bring tears to your eyes, unhinge your nervous system and knock you out.

Follow your bliss. That which you love you must spend your life doing, as passionately and as perfectly as your heart, mind and instincts allow. The sooner you identify that bliss, which surely resides in the soul of most human beings, the greater your chance of a truly successful life. In the act of creativity, being careful guarantees sameness and mediocrity, which means your work will be invisible. Better to be reckless than careful. Better to be bold than safe. Better to have your work seen and remembered, or you've struck out. There is no middle ground.

Nothing comes from nothing. You must continuously feed the inner beast that sparks and inspires.

Creativity can solve almost any problem.

Working hard and doing doing great work is as imperative as breathing. Creating great work warms the heart and enriches the soul. Those of us lucky enough to spend our days doing something we love, something we're good at, are rich. If you do not work passionately (even furiously) at being the best in the world at what you do, you fail your talent, your destiny, and your god.

Only with absolute fearlessness can we slay the dragons of mediocrity that invade our gardens.

Most people work at keeping their job, rather than doing a good job. If you're the former, you're leading a meaningless life. If you're the latter, keep up the good work.

In any creative industry, the fact that others are moving in a certain direction is always proof positive, at least to me, that a new direction is the only direction.

Advertising, an art, is constantly besieged and compromised by logicians and technocrats, the scientists of our profession who wildly miss the main point about everything we do.

Nothing great can come of more than three people in a room.

The joy of the creative process, minute by minute, hour after hour, day by day, is the sublime path to true happiness.

A cautious creative is an oxymoron.

I am in the poison gas business. Advertising should make you choke, make your eyes water, make you feel sick.

Follow your bliss. That which you love you must spend your life doing, as passionately and as perfectly as your heart, mind and instincts allow.

Never, ever, work for bad people

If a man does not work passionately - even furiously - at being the best in the world at what he does, he fails his talent, his destiny, and his God.

The accurate measure of a human being is what he or she actually gets done.

If you think people are dumb, you'll spend a lifetime doing dumb work.

Onwards and upwards, and never give your failures a second thought.

The business world worships mediocrity. Officially we revere free enterprise, initiative and individuality. Unofficially we fear it.

Never listen to music when you're trying go come up with a Big Idea.

But I love that feeling of utter depletion: It is an ecstatic sense of having committed myself to the absolute limit. But after recharging at night, I'm ready to go the next morning. Isn't that what life is all about?

Museums are custodians of epiphanies, and these epiphanies enter the central nervous system and deep recesses of the mind.

Only mediocre ideas can be tested.