If you have decided that you can’t do art until you quiet the voice of resistance, you will never do art. Art is the act of doing work that matters while dancing with the voice in your head that screams for you to stop. We can befriend the lizard, lull it into stupor, or merely face it down, but it’s there, always. As soon as you embrace the lizard (not merely tolerate it but engage it as a partner in your art), then you are free.
~ Seth Godin
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You are under no obligation to remain the same person you were a year ago, a month ago, or even a day ago. You are here to create yourself, continuously.
~ Richard Feynman
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Make your own bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.
~ Kurt Vonnegut
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When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart.
~ William Gibson
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History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
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If there was a little more silence, if we all kept quiet… maybe we could understand something.
~ Federico Fellini
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The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
~ Warren Bennis
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In my opinion, we don’t devote nearly enough scientific research to finding a cure for jerks.
~ Bill Watterson
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We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.
~ Carl Sagan
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…we see what we believe, not the other way around. Rarely do we see the world as it is. Most of the time we are so busy compartmentalizing, judging, and ignoring what we can’t abide that we see almost nothing. We don’t see opportunities. We fail to see pain. And most of all, we refuse to see the danger in doing nothing. If you can’t see, you will never make art successfully.
~ Seth Godin
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Often it isn’t the mountains ahead that wear you out, it’s the little pebble in your shoe.
~ Muhammad Ali
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I tell my students, when you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.
~ Toni Morrison
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Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.
~ Miyamoto Musashi
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The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.
~ George Orwell
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Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.
~ Isaac Asimov
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I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravished.
~ Djuna Barnes
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You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
~ Buckminster Fuller
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Honesty always gets my attention. Not particularly someone who is honest to me, but someone who is honest with themselves.
~ Heath Ledger
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The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how to behave when we don’t know what to do.
~ John Holt
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