Better questions

Sounds like we’re losing our grit. We’ve been brought up to think we’re so smart and clever and that we don’t have to work hard for anything that we just give up when we come against a tough problem. The main difference between innovators and the rest of us is that innovators ask more and better questions.

~ Shane Parrish

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Digital minimalism

To be a digital minimalist, in other words, means you accept the idea that new communication technologies have the potential to massively improve your life, but also recognize that realizing this potential is hard work.

~ Cal Newport

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Keeping you small

The trick is: You bite off more than you can chew… and then you still chew it. Your mind always believes it can do less than it actually can. It will tell you it’s too much, to stop, to take a break, to cancel this or that. But your mind will lie to you to keep you small.

~ Will Smith

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The wisdom of the body

You can’t dance and be sad. You can listen to music and cry, you can read and cry, you can draw and cry but you can’t dance and cry. The body won’t let you.

~ Esther Perel

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Statuary

Sculpture is more divine, and more like nature,
that fashions all her works in high relief,
and that is sculpture. This vast ball, the Earth,
was moulded out of clay, and baked in fire;
Men, women, and all animals that breath
are statues, and not paintings.

~ Longfellow

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Amusements

Let us read, and let us dance; These two amusements will never do harm to the world.

~ Voltaire

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Illusion

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.

~ Erwin Schrödinger

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Sculpting

The sculptor must paint with his chisel: Half his touches are not to realize, but to put power into, the form. They are touches of light and shadow, and raise a ridge, or sink a hollow, not to represent an actual ridge or hollow, but to get a line of ight, or a spot of darkness.

~ John Ruskin

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Rewriting

Rewriting [is] very painful. You know it’s finished when you can’t do anything more to it, though it’s never exactly the way you want it… The hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. You have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

~ James Baldwin

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True beauty

Moral beauty is the basis of all true beauty. This foundation is somewhat covered and veiled in Nature. Art brings it out, and gives it more transparent forms.

~ Victor Cousin

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