Good Quotes on Life, Writing and Art

"Plan for tomorrow, but live for today." © 2013 Sylvia Liu
Some of my favorite quotes to inspire you today:



Art

  • Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. Howard Thurman, civil rights activist.  
  • It is the pencil that teaches best, and anyway, the trees of theory can obscure the forest of practice. Ivan Brunetti, Cartooning
  • This is the theory . . . that anything that is art . . .is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it's no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating.  Edward Gorey, illustrator   

Writing

  • You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
  • Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. Anne Lammott, Bird by Bird
  • If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it. Toni Morrison 

 Books

  • If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. Haruki Murakami  
  • There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book. Marcel Proust
  • What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. Carl Sagan

    Perseverance

    • Courage is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. Winston Churchill

    Life

    • Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver
    • I have no books which tell me much and what they do I cannot apply to what I see... I draw my own conclusions, and most gloriously ridiculous ones they are. Charles Darwin
    • Rule number one: the most important thing about you is your date of birth. Which puts you inside history. Rule number two: sooner or later, each human life is a tragedy, sometimes, sooner, always later. Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow
    • If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.

      What are some of your favorite quotes?


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