Eric Maisel
Life is too short not to create, not to love, and not to lend a helping hand to our brothers and sisters.Collection: Brother
Dream, but expect nothing. Desire, but expect nothing. Hope, but expect nothing. Release your need to control and gain real control.Collection: Dream
When you flow like water you bring all of your talents and resources to your creative work... Flow around every obstacle you encounter, including any you've erected yourself.Collection: Water
When you consciously decide to breathe more slowly and deeply, you alert your body to the fact that you want it to behave differently. You are not just changing your breathing pattern, you are making a full-body announcement that you are entering into a different relationship with your mind and your body.Collection: Relationship
Settle into mystery as you would settle into your most comfortable chair. Listen. Have visions. Lose yourself.Collection: Vision
If, because of anxiety and self-doubt, you procrastinate and only think about working, you'll feel more exhausted than if you'd created for hours.Collection: Thinking
We have enough experiences in a day to make art for a decade.Collection: Art
There are an infinite number of rewards you could bestow on yourself for working at your creative projects, and you deserve every one of them.Collection: Numbers
Love is the spirit that motivates the artist's journey.Collection: Artist
The three elements of creativity are thus: loving, knowing, and doing - or heart, mind, and hands - or, as Zen Buddhist teaching has it; great faith, great question, and great courage.Collection: Buddhist
Whatever pain and suffering you've experienced in your life has been a blessing at least in this one regard: you now know some true things that you couldn't have learned any other way.Collection: Pain
Our desire is to grow so quiet and to work so deeply that we participate fully in the mystery in which we're embedded. When we manage to do that we feel as if we have merged with the universe; for the duration of that experience we feel immortal.Collection: Desire
To create you must quiet your mind. You need a quiet mind so that ideas will have a chance of connecting.Collection: Ideas
When the artist activates his being, awakens to his surroundings, and sets himself the task of creating, connections are made out of conscious awareness that return coalesced as inspiration.Collection: Inspiration
A wild person with a calm mind can make anything.Collection: Calm Mind
An artist feels vulnerable to begin with; and yet the only answer is to recklessly discard more armour.Collection: Artist
Talent is so loaded a word, so full to the brim with meanings, that an artist might be wise to forget about it altogether and just keep on working.Collection: Wise
One visit with a child can supply us with enough creativity dust to last for a lifetime... Visit with children like you're the child you ought to be more often.Collection: Children
You can't plan in advance for everything - every mood swing, every mistake you might make in execution, every shift in your circumstances. But you can keep updating your plan.Collection: Mistake
Creativity requires introspection, self-examination, and a willingness to take risks. Because of this, artists are perhaps more susceptible to self-doubt and despair than those who do not court the creative muses.Collection: Creativity
Creativity is the marriage humanity makes with eternity.Collection: Creativity
The artist... may suppose that ideas are his chief currency; but unless he is also attuned to feelings, in life and in art, he will not move his fellow human beings.Collection: Art
Isn't today a day to devote to craft? Isn't tomorrow? Isn't every day, routinely, until the end of time?Collection: Crafts
It is the job of each artist to believe in the possibility of meaningful, substantial, and sustainable change.Collection: Change
The artist at her best - wild, passionate, rebellious, and human - is often too large and truthful a creature for society's taste. The artist at her most outlandish - profane, eccentric, even a little mad - is at least as disquieting a figure.Collection: Artist
An artist's fine goal is to manifest a well-nigh heroic self-discipline, carefully attending to all that concerns him.Collection: Artist
While it may feel natural to devote yourself to your creative work and succumb to feelings of separation and alienation, it nevertheless isn't a terrific idea in terms of your overall happiness and health.Collection: Health
Chaos is everywhere - and artists, to fashion art and live truthfully, have no choice but to invite this unwanted guest right into the studio.Collection: Fashion
The artist is a god, but he is also an idiot. That is the human way.Collection: Artist
Art and business may be strange bedfellows, but an artist must make room in her bed for both.Collection: Art
Boredom is the thing that regularly arrives between excitements and episodes of meaning: it is as natural as the tides, and in it an artist can drown.Collection: Artist
While some part of the artwork may fail, the whole may have its own unique importance.Collection: Unique
The strange, unbeautiful face beautiful in its ugliness; the perfect, beautiful face ugly in its perfection.Collection: Beauty
Deconstruction is great for the intellect, but it hurts the heart terribly.Collection: Hurt
The artist dreams of works of real breadth; but, limited by his personality and the nature of his medium, limited by inner disturbances and loss of purpose, he often works more narrowly than he'd intended.Collection: Dream
Humanitarian convictions are the linchpins of our salvation, and these an artist must champion.Collection: Artist
The growth that an artist seeks is a fine combination of mastering craft, garnering an audience, maintaining one's mental health, and working mightily from a ever-expanding base of experience.Collection: Artist
Artists are often poignantly careless about making and keeping friends.Collection: Friendship
The artist must reckon with his own character flaws, which do not disappear just because he has been called to be an artist.Collection: Character
Artists have wild desires and a terrible hunger to achieve... Without it they haven't the juice for striving or loving. But desire also can make them greedy and turn dreams into unrealizable obsessions.Collection: Dream
Do I doubt the painting I've just painted because it is not right or because I can never like what I do?Collection: Doubt
Hurray for criticism, if it means that an artist's voice is heard. Let the wise artist invite criticism and survive it when it comes.Collection: Wise
Creativity is the gift that keeps on giving.Collection: Creativity
The artist must possess at least as much conviction as does his enemy, the dogmatic, mealy-mouthed, anti-art bigot.Collection: Art
Revealing secrets can bring us pain or get us into trouble, but worse pain and worse trouble await us if we keep silent...Revealing secrets can bring us pain or get us into trouble, but worse pain and worse trouble await us if we keep silentÂ… we become habitually untruthful. The door to our creativity closes. gr we become habitually untruthful. The door to our creativity closes.Collection: Pain
Who knows how many artists fail because the light that shines through them is defracted in a thousand directions and not concentrated in a single beam?Collection: Artist
A composition is an arrangement, built out of parts, that aims at seamlessness.Collection: Aim
The artist, busy and unsettled, can find a moment's peace - and even whole-being rejuvenation - by quietly attuning to a red sky, a gray sky, a black sky, a blue sky.Collection: Artist
An ability to choose is a necessity for the artist.Collection: Artist
To decide to reach for this blue and not that one, to switch styles or subject matter, to move, in the middle of a sentence, in one direction or another, to commit to this book when that one is also calling, are the sorts of choices that artists must make if they are to function.Collection: Moving