99 Quotes by Eric Maisel

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

The primary challenge that smart people must deal with is making sense of meaning. Natural psychology suggests that the best answer to this problem is donning the mantle of meaning-maker and engaging in value-based meaning-making. No smart person is immune to this problem. In fact, it is the most significant emotional issue for our smartest 15 percent.

The three elements of creativity are thus: loving, knowing, and doing – or heart, mind, and hands – or, as Zen Buddhist teaching has it; great faith, great question, and great courage.

To create you must quiet your mind. You need a quiet mind so that ideas will have a chance of connecting.

Artists are often poignantly careless about making and keeping friends.

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

But at heart what we are talking about is not pathology but an intense conflictual knowing, a knowing that we are worthy smacking up against a knowing that we are just passing through: a knowing, that is, that we matter and that we do not matter. This is a true and not a pathological understanding. Every smart person possesses this understanding and can’t help but feel distressed by this understanding.

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.

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.