Eric Maisel Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

Few people actually nominate themselves in this way. Most defer to the meaning-making apparatus of their culture, taking comfort in the fact that others have built a meaning nest for them. This built-in cover allows them to avoid taking responsibility and at the same time causes them to grow grandiose, narcissistic, and egotistical. As soon as you put on the robes of your culture and add gravity to your mere humanness by wearing the badge of your profession, your club, your gang, or your clan, you … refuse to engage in the process of personal meaning-making, with its requirements of honesty and self-awareness.

Eric Maisel
A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.

Eric Maisel
To define what we are is to reduce and distort what we are: to say that we are nothing but our desires or nothing but our self-interest is to misrepresent us.

Eric Maisel
I nominate myself means I won't follow. This isn't hubris: it is simply the fruit of your decision to live on your own terms.

Eric Maisel
You nominate yourself to be the one who will courageously do what you think ought to be done, even if everyone is pressing you to do something else.

Eric Maisel
Art and business may be strange bedfellows, but an artist must make room in her bed for both.

Eric Maisel
Live intensely and dangerously. The world may not depend on your efforts, but you do.

Eric Maisel
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.

Eric Maisel
Artists disbelieve and dispute society's most cherished notions.

Eric Maisel
Artists are often poignantly careless about making and keeping friends.

Eric Maisel
The artist can't paint, sing, or dance without emotion: if he does, he is a machine masquerading as a person.

Eric Maisel
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.

Eric Maisel
While some part of the artwork may fail, the whole may have its own unique importance.

Eric Maisel
Many people are embarrassed to create in public. It feels unseemly to them, like kissing in plain view... Make a spectacle of yourself.

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

Eric Maisel
It is the artist's job to revere beauty without being enchanted by it, to aim for it but also to aim for truth and goodness - just in case they, and not beauty, are the real things of value.

Eric Maisel
To nominate yourself as the hero of your own story is to step outside society, not with the intention of turning your back on it but with the intention of not allowing it to dictate to you.

Eric Maisel
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.

Eric Maisel
Artists know failure. It is not tragic that they know failure; it is only tragic if they know failure and little else...

Eric Maisel
The artist dreams of works of real breadth; but, limited by his personality and the nature of his medium, limited by inner disturbances and loss of purpose, he often works more narrowly than he'd intended.

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

Eric Maisel
Love is the spirit that motivates the artist's journey. The love may sublime, raw, obsessive, passionate, awful. or thrilling, but whatever its quality, it's a powerful motive in the artist's life.

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

Eric Maisel
Keenly aware of their limitations, artists often remain insecure even as their list of successes grows.

Eric Maisel
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.

Eric Maisel
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.

Eric Maisel