Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get when you don’t.
~ Pete Seeger
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Quotes
A long long time ago I began collecting inspirational quotes and aphorisms which became my collection of quotes.
Pursue your dreams
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.
~ Henry David Thoreau
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Pure joy
I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe runs on an axis of suffering; Surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!
~ Louise Bogan
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Grandiose fantasies
Grandiose fantasies are a symptom of Resistance. They’re the sign of an amateur. The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not com, whatever they like.
~ Steven Pressfield
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Thoughtful solitude
One hour of thoughtful solitude may nerve the heart for days of conflict—girding up its armor to meet the most insidious foe.
~ Percival
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Understanding
Do not weep; Do not wax indignant. Understand.
~ Baruch Spinoza
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The artist-child
Spending time in solitude with your artist child is essential to self-nurturing. A long country walk, a solitary expedition to the beach for a sunrise or sunset, a sortie out to strange church to hear gospel music, to an ethnic neighborhood to taste foreign sights and sounds—your artist might enjoy any of these. Or your artist might like bowling.
~ Julia Cameron
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A creative life
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
~ Joseph Chilton Pearce
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Self-realized
Individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others. If they speak at all, it is to offer encouragement. Watch yourself. Of all the manifestations of Resistance, most only harm ourselves. Criticism and cruelty harm others as well.
~ Steven Pressfield
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Social animal
It is all very well to insist that man is a “social animal”—the fact is obvious enough. But that is no justification for making him a mere cog in a totalitarian machine—or in a religious one either, for that matter. In actual fact, society depends for its existence on the inviolable personal solitude of its members. Society, to merit its name, must be made up not of numbers, or mechanical units, but of persons. To be a person implies responsibility and freedom, and both these imply a certain interior solitude, a sense of personal integrity, a sense of one’s own reality and of one’s ability to give himself to society—or to refuse that gift.
~ Thomas Merton
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The play instinct
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
~ Carl Jung
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Boredom
Boredom is just “What’s the use?” in disguise. And, “What’s the use?” is fear, and fear means you are secretly in despair. So put your fears on the page. Put anything on the page. Put three pages of it on the page.
~ Julia Cameron
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Potent muse
The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.
~ Stephen Nachmanovitch
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Procrastination
Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it’s the easiest to rationalize. We don’t tell ourselves, “I’m never going to write my symphony.” Instead we say, “I’m going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.”
~ Steven Pressfield
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Solitude
Solitude bears the same relation to the mind that sleep does to the body. It affords it the necessary opportunities for repose and recovery.
~ William G. Simms
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Painting
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
~ Pablo Picasso
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Universality
Creativity is harnessing universality and making it flow through your eyes.
~ Peter Koestenbaum
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Redemption
Because it’s elitist, an initiation into arcana. Because it’s nostalgic, rowing being a skill not much in demand in the industrial world. Because it’s fragile: The boat club is run on a shoestring, and the beat-up old boats held together by spit. Because it’s dangerous, and exercises the wits against the wind and the water. Because it’s a ritual. Because it’s redemption.
~ Barry Strauss
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The warrior and the artist
[…] fear doesn’t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.
~ Steven Pressfield
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Conduct of life
Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind, and spirit. The man who preserves his selfhood ever calm and unshaken by the storms of existence—not a leaf, as it were, astir on the tree; Not a ripple upon the surface of shining pool—his, in the mind of the unlettered sage, is the ideal attitude and conduct of life.
~ Charles Eastman
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