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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.
But by definition, when you make something no one hates, no one loves it.
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.
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Love does not obey our expectations; it obeys our intentions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am born with a past, and to try to cut myself off from that past is to deform my present relationships.
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.
If you are to truly understand, then you will need the contrast, not adherence to a single idea.
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.
Video game: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Love eventually leads to as much pain as it does happiness.
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.
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.
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.
Book: How to Leave Twitter
Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional marriage, when divorce has already broken it down.
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.
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.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
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.
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.
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.
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
your bodies center of mass is accelerated so fast that if you don’t put your feet in front of you, you fall :P
To accept our own fallability is to embrace “the permanent possibility of someone having a better idea.”
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.
That’s why the rewards for successfully producing something that people want are so disproportionately high.
[Racism] is not about how you look, it is about how people assign meaning to how you look.
A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
To forgive is to set a prisoner free and realize that prisoner was you.
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.
Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right.
You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger.
Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.
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.
You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You can find yourself by coming into the present.
We choose our destiny in the way we treat others.
On a deeper level you are already complete. When you realize that, there is a joyous energy behind what you do.
I have done my best: that is about all the philosophy of living one needs.
You get peace of mind not by thinking about it or imagining it, but by quietening and relaxing the restless mind.
Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.
To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.
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