Eric Maisel Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

Settle into mystery as you would settle into your most comfortable chair. Listen. Have visions. Lose yourself.

Eric Maisel
I am a human being and an artist: I really, simply, surely am.

Eric Maisel
A creative block is a fear about the future, a guess about the dangers dwelling in the dark computer and the locked studio.

Eric Maisel
If you create you will also wait, and while you're waiting you will want to be patient but not idle... responses from the world often take a long time.

Eric Maisel
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?

Eric Maisel
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.

Eric Maisel
To obsess too virulently is to walk alone in anxiety. But to obsess too little is to wall oneself off from one's own creativity.

Eric Maisel
I am one powerful self made up of so many selves that sometimes I throw myself a get-acquainted party.

Eric Maisel
No muse shoots darts of insight into the unsuspecting artist.

Eric Maisel
An artist who is too self-centered is liable to exhibit faults he abhors: carelessness, callousness, and even downright cruelty.

Eric Maisel
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.

Eric Maisel
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.

Eric Maisel
Isn't today a day to devote to craft? Isn't tomorrow? Isn't every day, routinely, until the end of time?

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

Eric Maisel
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.

Eric Maisel
While artists fervently believe that the art marketplace was invented by the devil and remains in his henchman's hands, they have no choice but to carry long spoons and sup there.

Eric Maisel
Art is manipulation, the management of material, the directing of fate... Who does that directing?

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

Eric Maisel
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.

Eric Maisel
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.

Eric Maisel
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.

Eric Maisel
It is the job of each artist to believe in the possibility of meaningful, substantial, and sustainable change.

Eric Maisel
Let each of us dream of a community of artists and work to make that dream a reality.

Eric Maisel
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.

Eric Maisel
Even though we require flexibility to negotiate our changing circumstances, we are rather built to anxiously turn away from alternatives.

Eric Maisel
Creativity is part sweat - not just beads of it, but sometimes buckets.

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

Eric Maisel
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.

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

Eric Maisel
If you bring your sexual impulses to your creative work... you'll be working from deep in the genetic code, down where life wants to make new life and feel good in the process.

Eric Maisel