Eric Maisel Quotes - Page 2

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.

It is the job of each artist to believe in the possibility of meaningful, substantial, and sustainable change.

Your chances of creating deeply hinge on the quality of your awareness state.

If we had the consciousness of a cat or a dog, we would have it in us to become perfect Zen masters. We could gnaw on a bone, take a nap, play with a spider until we killed it, get our litter just right, and be innocently and serenely present. Meaning would mean nothing to us, nor would we need it to mean anything. We would be free, and we would be spared. But, we are human beings, and we posses that odd duck – human consciousness.

Almost nothing beautiful or brilliant happens unless a person has thought about it a lot.

Affirmations need to be used if they are to become incorporated into the fabric of your being.

Creativity is part sweat - not just beads of it, but sometimes buckets.

If you bring your sexual impulses to your creative work... you'll be working from deep in the genetic code, down where life wants to make new life and feel good in the process.

I am a human being and an artist: I really, simply, surely am.

It is in an artist's real interest to congratulate herself more often: not out of narcissism, but in her role as her own dear friend and advocate.

The more sophisticated we become - as we pierce reality and see the void beyond - the more our sense of wonder is destroyed, along with our reasons for being.

Live intensely and dangerously. The world may not depend on your efforts, but you do.

The artist who pictures sounds as colours, who feels the difference in microns between one sea green and another... is not attending to what the world considers important.

I am one powerful self made up of so many selves that sometimes I throw myself a get-acquainted party.

Even though we require flexibility to negotiate our changing circumstances, we are rather built to anxiously turn away from alternatives.

An artist... must actively caress wonder: for fascination, like the desire to play, can be eradicated by the rigors of living.

The artist can't paint, sing, or dance without emotion: if he does, he is a machine masquerading as a person.

A creative block is a fear about the future, a guess about the dangers dwelling in the dark computer and the locked studio.

Artists know failure. It is not tragic that they know failure; it is only tragic if they know failure and little else.

By 'expecting nothing' you are not 'giving up.' Far from it! You are making a decision to focus on what needs to be done rather than on outcomes.

An artist who is too self-centered is liable to exhibit faults he abhors: carelessness, callousness, and even downright cruelty.

Rekindling hope, engaging in inner work, and venturing into the world amount to a complete plan for picking yourself up when you're down.

When a thing is not done, continuing to work is the strength; but when it is done, the strength lies in stopping.

The middle way cannot be achieved by dividing two extremes in half.

A time comes, after years in the trenches, when the artist begins to fathom what his career has looked like so far and what it will look like if he continues as he's proceeded.