You don’t know if your idea is any good the moment it’s created. Neither does anyone else. The most you can hope for is a strong gut feeling that it is. And trusting your feelings is not as easy as the optimists say it is. There’s a reason why feelings scare us—because what they tell us and what the rest of the world tells us are often two different things.
~ Hugh MacLeod
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Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.
~ Josh Billings
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I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up you pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing.
~ Shirley Jackson
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I don’t complain about the lack of time… what little I have will go far enough. Today—this day—will achieve what no tomorrow will fail to speak about. I will lay seige to the gods and shake up the world.
~ Seneca, Medea, 423-5
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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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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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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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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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Sculpture is more divine, and more like nature,
~ Longfellow
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.
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Let us read, and let us dance; These two amusements will never do harm to the world.
~ Voltaire
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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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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 [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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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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If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; If you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.
~ James Baldwin
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It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
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The idea of the painter and the sculptor is undoubtedly that perfect and excellent example of the mind, by imitation of which imagined form all things are represented which fall under human sight.
~ John Dryden
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Something that irritates you. That’s the anguish of it. Do this book, or die. You have to go through that. Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: Discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.
~ James Baldwin
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Only actions give life strength; Only moderation gives it a charm.
~ Richter
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Moderation resembles temperance. We are not so unwilling to eat more, as afraid of doing ourselves harm by it.
~ Rochefoucauld
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