“Free your mind and your ass will follow.” -Parliament Funkadelic
“In the Beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.”
-Shunryu Suzuki
“Doubt is the origin of truth.” -Socrates
“I am what I am and that’s all that I am.” -Popeye
“Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos. Before a brilliant person begins something great, he must look foolish to the crowd.” -I Ching
“Creativity comes to the prepared mind.” -Louis Pasteur
“I may walk slow but at least I don’t walk backwards.” -Abraham Lincoln
“He who has [success] would do well to have it as though he did not have it. Only unbroken equanimity can accept it in a way that it is not afraid to come back.”
-Herrigel’s master from Zen in the Art of Archery
“Do not fear mistakes- there are none.” -Miles Davis
“Know thyself.” -Socrates
“You cannot observe something without having an effect on it.” -Stephen Hawking
“You’re only looking for what you expect to find.” -Jessica Fletcher (on “Murder She Wrote”, March 15, 1992)
“What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think what you do not do yourself does not happen.” --Herrigel’s master from Zen in the Art of Archery
“Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.” -M.C. Richards
“Illogic is an important part of being human. With logic you cannot jump, you cannot make hypotheses. You need fantasy for that.” -Nicholas Harnoncourt (musician) quoting Einstein
“If you only deal with what is known, you’ll have redundancy; on the other hand, if you only deal with the unknown, you cannot communicate at all. There is always some combination of the two, and it is how they touch each other that makes communication interesting.” -Bruce Nauman
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: If there is any reaction, both are transformed.” -Carl Jung
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.” -Albert Einstein
“The Absolute manifests itself in hollow; only its absence can be circumscribed.” -Chinese philosophy
“What matters is the experience; the work itself is a mere accidental consequence, a secondary result, a visible (or audible) left-over-- it is nothing but ‘the imprint left perchance in the snow by a wild swan.’”
-Simon Leys (on Chinese painting)
“Theory does not precede practice but follows it.” -Wassily Kandinsky
“Permitting greater complexity leads finally to a grander simplicity, with perplexity a condition to be suffered, or perhaps enjoyed along the way.” - ?
“The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald
“When you’re on the ice, for God’s sake do something. Skate, fight, score, anything but standing around in the neutral zone.” -Don Cherry
"You can play a shoestring if you're sincere." -John Coltraine
“We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.” -Albert Einstein
“Write from your obsessions. They’re going to run your life anyway, so why not harness them?” -Natalie Goldberg (author)
“Epigrams succeed where epics fail.” -Persian proverb
“Art is what makes life more interesting than art.” -Lucy Lippard
"Then indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting over lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." -Goethe