George Leonard Quotes

How do you best move toward mastery? To put it simply, you practice diligently, but you practice primarily for the sake of the practice itself.

At the heart of it, mastery is practice. Mastery is staying on the path.

Even without comparing ourselves to the world's greatest, we set such high standards for ourselves that neither we nor anyone else could ever meet them-and nothing is more destructive to creativity than this. We fail to realize that mastery is not about perfection. It's about a process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for as long as he or she lives.

How to begin the journey? You need only to take the first step. When? There is always now.

The real juice of life, whether it be sweet or bitter, is to be found not nearly so much in the products of our efforts as in the process of living itself, in how it feels to be alive.

Keep practicing, even when you seem to be getting nowhere.

The essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty. Satisfaction lies in mindful repetition, the discovery of endless richness in subtle variations on familiar themes.

Ultimately, human intentionality is the most powerful evolutionary force on this planet.

It's easy to get on the path of mastery. The real challenge lies in staying on it.

Mastery is a journey, and that the master must have the courage to risk failure.

Of what is the body made? It is made of emptiness and rhythm. At the ultimate heart of the body, at the heart of the world, there is no solidity. Once again, there is only the dance.

In terms of the game theory, we might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt. Similarly, the geometry of life is designed to keep us at the point of maximum tension between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos. Every important call is a close one. We survive and evolve by the skin of our teeth. We really wouldn't want it any other way.

Education is... doing anything that changes you.

If you intend to take the journey of mastery, the best thing you can do is to arrange for first-rate instruction.

Not to dream more boldly may turn out to be, in view of present realities, simply irresponsible.

At the heart of each of us, whatever our imperfections, there exists a silence pulse of perfect rhythm which is absolutely individual and unique, and yet which connects us to everything else.

To love the plateau is to love what is most essential and enduring in your life.

The more you move in rhythm with someone, the closer you become with that person.

Perhaps we'll never know how far the path can go, how much a human being can truly achieve, until we realize that the ultimate reward is not a gold medal but the path itself.

Mastery is the art of setting your foot on the path.

Perhaps the safest prediction we can make about the future is that it will surprise us.

The subtle dance of the body joins us to the world.

What if you're practicing wrong? Then you get very good at doing something wrong.

Now here is a key: you want to make it real and present in the realm of your consciousness. You don't say "I'm going to do such and such" - it already has happened. Now, is consciousness real? It exists and it is very powerful. The idea is to have this mesh between your consciousness - your visualization - and the so-called material world.

Practice is the path of mastery.