The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
Chuck Close
But by definition, when you make something no one hates, no one loves it.
Tibor Kalman
Negativity is the enemy to creativity. So if you want more ideas flowing, happiness in the doing, happiness in the doing, happiness in the doing. I love, capital L-O-V-E, building a thing that ultimately has to feel correct before it’s finished, and that feeling correct is like a drug. It’s like a thing that just kicks you and makes you feel so good. You almost pass out. You fall off your feet.
David Lynch
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Andre Gide
Love does not obey our expectations; it obeys our intentions.
Lloyd Strom
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eggplant / people #
So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.
Sylvia Plath
In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I don’t see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish academy just decides that this work is noble enough to receive a prize — I’ve already gotten the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding a thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it — those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me. I don’t believe in honors.
Richard Feynmann
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. […] I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose.
Richard Feynmann
I am born with a past, and to try to cut myself off from that past is to deform my present relationships.
Alasdair MacIntyre
The contrast with the narrative view of the self is clear. For the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity.
Alasdair MacIntyre
If you are to truly understand, then you will need the contrast, not adherence to a single idea.
Kreia
Video game: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
Love doesn’t lead to the dark side. Passion can lead to rage and fear and can be controlled, but passion is not the same thing as love. Controlling your passions while being in love - that is what they should teach you to beware of. But love itself will save you, not condemn you.
Jolee Bindo
Video game: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Love eventually leads to as much pain as it does happiness.
Jolee Bindo
Video game: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
We’re born alone, live alone, and die alone. Only through love and friendship can we create the illusion that we’re not alone.
Orson Welles
You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
Karl Paulnack
Speech: http://www.bostonconservatory.edu/music/karl-paulnack-welcome-address
It puzzles me how many people still believe ‘friendship’ or at least bonhomie conducted in cyberspace isn’t a valuable form of social contact, but, say, being thrown together at an NCT group, or in halls of residence, or because your desks at work face on to each other, is. Or that anodyne small talk with a neighbour is ‘genuine social stimulation,’ whereas chatting over Twitter with someone 6,000 miles away who loves Top Gun and Jefferson Airplane as much as you do is just lonely, dysfunctional nerds clashing in cyberspace. This, to my mind, is idiotic. It’s time for us all to come out of the closet about our secret internet chums.
Grace Dent
Book: How to Leave Twitter
Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional marriage, when divorce has already broken it down.
Rick Marks
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eggplant / obsession, passion #
I’d rather be around a passionate nerd than a non-passionate cool person. Because if you lack passion, your soul is diminishing by the second. You have to be passionate about something. Call it obsessed or whatever you want, but be obsessed about something. Obsessed people care. I’m passionate about so many things, it becomes an issue at certain points, but at least you have the ability to feel that much about something.
Matt Cohen
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eggplant / alcohol, caffeine, drugs, society #
If you want to understand society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.
Bill Hicks
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
George Orwell
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eggplant / secrets, self, thought, truth, words #
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.
Stephen King
Change is not a process for the impatient.
Barbara Reinhold
Everyone Is a Genius, but if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.
Albert Einstein
I couldn’t decide whether to write fetus or embryo, and I knew that if I picked one, then people would say that I should’ve picked the other, so I decided to avoid the issue entirely by writing “adorable little parasite”. This is what nitpickers have turned me into.
Raymond Chen
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eggplant / discovery, growth, life, self #
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
your bodies center of mass is accelerated so fast that if you don’t put your feet in front of you, you fall :P
Ivo Flipse
To accept our own fallability is to embrace “the permanent possibility of someone having a better idea.”
Richard Rorty
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eggplant / consume, consumption, produce, production #
It’s so easy to consume. It’s much harder to produce something.

That’s why the rewards for successfully producing something that people want are so disproportionately high.
Ramit Sethi
[Racism] is not about how you look, it is about how people assign meaning to how you look.
Robin D.G. Kelley
Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.
Caterina Fake
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eggplant / heart, inside, view, world #
A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
Johann Von Goethe
To forgive is to set a prisoner free and realize that prisoner was you.
Lewis B. Smedes
Growth begins when we begin to accept our weaknesses.
Jean Vanier
The beginning of adolescence seems to mark the abrupt end of artistic development in terms of drawing skills for many adults. As children, they confronted an artistic crisis, a conflict between their increasingly complex perceptions of the world around them and their current level of art skill.
Betty Edwards
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eggplant / academic, clever #
Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right.
Donald Norman
You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger.
Buddha
Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.
Paul Boese
If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace.
Ajahn Chah
You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You can find yourself by coming into the present.
Eckhart Tolle
The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment.
Pema Chodron
We choose our destiny in the way we treat others.
Wit
On a deeper level you are already complete. When you realize that, there is a joyous energy behind what you do.
Eckhart Tolle
I have done my best: that is about all the philosophy of living one needs.
Lin-yutang
You get peace of mind not by thinking about it or imagining it, but by quietening and relaxing the restless mind.
Remez Sasson
Hope is the feeling that the feeling you have isn’t permanent.
Jean Kerr
Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.
Pema Chodron
To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.
Thich Nhat Hanh
We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust our sails.
Anonymous
You only lose what you cling to.
Buddha