Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.
Tag: quotes
Happy endings in life, and in fiction too perhaps, are really about where you decide to roll the credits.
Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.
Hippocrates. We know it best as the phrase “life is short”, but I didn’t know that was shortened from a longer, more interesting line: “Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment fallible, judgment difficult.” Ars longa, vita brevis – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The real risk is in not changing. I have to feel that I’m after something. If I make money, fine. But I’d rather be striving. It’s the striving, man, it’s that I want.
John Coltrane, quoted in Paul D. Zimmerman’s “Death of a Jazz Man”, Newsweek, July 31, 1967.
So much more than the world could offer
From historian Daniel Boorstin’s introduction to The Image, his book from 1961:
When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect — we even demand — that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect “news” to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect our house to not only shelter us, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place; and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway place. We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night. We expect everybody to feel free to disagree, yet we expect everybody to be loyal, not to rock the boat or to take the Fifth Amendment. We expect everybody to believe deeply in his religion, yet not to think less of others for not believing. We expect our nation to be strong and great and vast and varied and prepared for every challenge; yet we expect our “national purpose” to be clear and simple, something that gives direction to the lives of nearly two hundred million people and yet can be bought in a paperback at the corner drugstore for a dollar.
We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for “excellence,” to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to a “church of our choice” and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be a God.
Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never have people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.
Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
That’s attributed to Socrates, but who knows? Nonetheless, mental note. It pays to keep a healthy skepticism of how you spend your time, busy or not.
When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.
Erasmus (via austinkleon)
The toy is the child’s earliest initiation into art, or rather for him it is the first concrete example of art…
Charles Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys” (via) cf. “[Making art is] practicing a physical activity with a certain state of mind. It’s similar to a kid who is absorbed in deep play. A kid with a toy is in a relationship with that toy. The toy is playing with him just as much as he’s playing with the toy.” – Lynda Barry (via austinkleon)
Art really saved my life because art is how I proved that I wasn’t a malingerer.
Interview with Chuck Close. A long, wonderful discussion of his life and work. Topics include playing to your strengths, supportive parents, taking art classes in a brothel, and much much much more.
Everything’s the perfect back drop for a suit.
Psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex.
Adam Phillips quoted in My Life in Therapy – NYTimes.com.
If you aren’t having no fun, die, because you’re running a worthless program, far as I’m concerned.
Maybe one of the single best things a person can do for themselves is to shift from their default self-worth goals (seeking to prove self-worth and to avoid proof of worthlessness) to learning goals.
Family. Friends. Health. Work. Pick any three.
Communicatrix. Reminds me of an optimist-realist mantra I either invented or stole sometime around high school, and occasionally have to remind myself: “You can have anything you want. Just not all at the same time.”
Bad poets just bore us, but bad critics mislead us.
Tommy Howells, a teacher at Whitman College from 1938 through 1987, on Twitter. I’ve been favoriting the crap out of that Twitter account, brought to my attention via Austin’s 5 recent reads.
Glances are the big guns of the virtuous coquette; everything can be conveyed in a look, and yet that look can always be denied, because it cannot be quoted word for word.
Stendhal in his book, On Love. Love in the Age of the Pickup Artist: Stendhal Among the Seducers – The Point Magazine.
It is pleasant to observe how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next. FUTURE AGES SHALL TALK OF THIS; THIS SHALL BE FAMOUS TO ALL POSTERITY. Whereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now.
Because growth curves are asymptotic, I am convinced it is better to get pretty good at a lot of things rather than investing your scarce time in becoming marginally better at a couple of things.
Wehr in the World: Squibs. It may also be easier/more efficient to maintain a state of pretty-goodness than a state of mastery.
The first strong external revelation of the Dry Rot in men, is a tendency to lurk and lounge; to be at street-corners without intelligible reason; to be going anywhere when met; to be about many places rather than at any; to do nothing tangible, but to have an intention of performing a variety of intangible duties to-morrow or the day after.
Mark Larson 