Eric Maisel Quotes

Life is too short not to create, not to love, and not to lend a helping hand to our brothers and sisters.

Dream, but expect nothing. Desire, but expect nothing. Hope, but expect nothing. Release your need to control and gain real control.

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.

We have enough experiences in a day to make art for a decade.

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.

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.

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.

The artist's personality, built upon strong desires and compassionate vision, is by its nature prone to depression.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Creativity is the marriage humanity makes with eternity.

Humanitarian convictions are the linchpins of our salvation, and these an artist must champion.

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

Chaos is everywhere - and artists, to fashion art and live truthfully, have no choice but to invite this unwanted guest right into the studio.

A composition is an arrangement, built out of parts, that aims at seamlessness.

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.

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

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

An artist feels vulnerable to begin with; and yet the only answer is to recklessly discard more armour.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

Affirmations are not bound up in rules. An affirmation can be long or short, poetic or plain. If you love a phrase and find that it helps you, that is a valid affirmation.

The artist is a god, but he is also an idiot. That is the human way.

The artist must reckon with his own character flaws, which do not disappear just because he has been called to be an 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.

An ability to choose is a necessity for the 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.

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.

Creativity is the gift that keeps on giving.

The artist must possess at least as much conviction as does his enemy, the dogmatic, mealy-mouthed, anti-art bigot.

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 silent… we become habitually untruthful. The door to our creativity closes. gr we become habitually untruthful. The door to our creativity closes.

An inability to choose is a hallmark of anxiety... The too-anxious artist, afraid to choose, will halt dead in the water.

Remind yourself of the value of detaching from work that's out of your hands and committing to new work that wants to be born.

Ambition is vital, but dangerous: it is a keen motive and a driving force, but over what edge can it drive the artist?

The artist, who must venture into the studio and risk there, and then venture into the marketplace and risk again, is obliged to learn how her defences work, so that she can drop and raise her guard instantly.

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.

All space is space in which to create.

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.