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Part of being creative is learning how to protect your freedom. That includes freedom from avarice.
Hugh Macleod, How To Be Creative: 31 Remain Frugal, 08-22-04
Nobody can tell you if what you’re doing is good, meaningful or worthwhile. The more compelling the path, the more lonely it is.
Hugh Macleod, How To Be Creative: 5. You are responsible for your own experience., 08-22-04
Admit that your own private Mount Everest exists. That is half the battle.
Hugh Macleod, How To Be Creative: 9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb., 08-22-04
There’s no correlation between creativity and equipment ownership. None. Zilch. Nada. Actually, as the artist gets more into his thing, and as he gets more successful, his number of tools tends to go down. He knows what works for him. Expending mental energy on stuff wastes time.
- I do the very best I know how-the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.
- Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865), Francis Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 1867
- The less their ability, the more their conceit.
- Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment.
- Baltasar Gracian
- Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.
- Be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved or untrained to stand the test.
- Daniel Akst, We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, 2011
- The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a difference. Not change the world exactly, just the bit around you. Go out there with your double-first, your passion and your new Smith Corona electric typewriter and work hard at ... something. Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible. Eat sensibly. Stuff like that.
- David Nicholls, One Day, 2010
- It is a great ability to be able to conceal one's ability.
- Martyrdom... is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), The Devil's Disciple (1901) act 3
- I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
- Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.
- Malcolm Forbes (1919 - 1990)
- Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as "suits."
- Nerds don't just happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity.
- Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
- The Army has carried the American ... ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability.
- Tom Lehrer (1928 - )
I do not regret one professional enemy I have made. Any actor who doesn't dare to make an enemy should get out of the business.
Bette Davis (1908 - 1989), The Lonely Life, 1962
- Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
- Talk low, talk slow, and don't talk too much.
- John Wayne (1907 - 1979), Advice on acting
- Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion.
- Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.
- Katharine Hepburn (1907 - 2003)
- Being a celebrity has taught me to hide, but being an actor has opened my soul.
- Empathy is at the heart of the actor's art.
- Meryl Streep (1949 - ), Barnard Commencement Speech, 2010
- One is obliged to do a great deal of kissing in my line of work: air kissing, [butt] kissing, kissing up, and of course actual kissing. Much like hookers, actors have to do it with people we may not like or even know.
- Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending, or acting, is a very valuable life skill and we do it all the time.
- Meryl Streep (1949 - ), Barnard Commencement Speech, 2010
- While I am overwhelmingly proud of work that I, believe me, did not do on my own, I can assure you that awards have very little bearing on my own personal happiness, my own sense of well-being and purpose in the world.
- Women are better at acting then men. Why? Because we have to be. If successfully convincing someone bigger than you are of something he doesn't want to know is a survival skill, this is how women have survived through the millennia.
- Meryl Streep (1949 - ), Barnard Commencement Speech, 2010
- There's a rule in acting called, "Don't play the result." If you have a character who's going to end up in a certain place, don't play that until you get there. Play each scene and each beat as it comes. And that's what you do in life: You don't play the result.
- The most difficult character in comedy is that of a fool, and he must be no simpleton who plays the part.
- I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
- Acting like someone you're not is exactly what it takes to realize you're capable of more than you ever knew.
- I enjoy being a highly overpaid actor.
- Roger Moore (1927 - )
- Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.
- When a man plays a woman in a dress, you're halfway there. It's inherently funny. When a woman plays a man, for whatever reason, it's not that instant kind of funny.
- You can be a little bit darker and rougher on the stage, partly because when you're in the theater, people have come to see you, and so they kind of know what they're in for. In television, you are sort of sneaking into people's homes. So, I think you can be a little bit darker on stage.
- We're actors - we're the opposite of people.
- Tom Stoppard (1937 - ), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967)
- Action:
- We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
- I've arrived at this outermost edge of my life by my own actions. Where I am is thoroughly unacceptable. Therefore, I must stop doing what I've been doing.
- All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.
- Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way... you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.
- Actions lie louder than words.
- The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.
- Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC), The Confucian Analects
- You cannot have a proud and chivalrous spirit if your conduct is mean and paltry; for whatever a man's actions are, such must be his spirit.
- I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.
- Dorothy Day (1897 - 1980), The Long Loneliness, 1952
- You ask me why I do not write something....I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.
- When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves he is not a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
- Georges Clemenceau (1841 - 1929), Conversation with Jean Martet, January 1 1929
- Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.
- Herbert Hoover (1874 - 1964)
- Only actions give life strength; only moderation gives it a charm.
- I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.
- We defend and we build a way of life, not for America alone, but for all mankind.
- Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
- We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with high and resolute courage. For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.
- Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919), Address at the opening of the gubernatorial campaign, New York City, October 5, 1898
- Strong reasons make strong actions.
- Advertising:
- I LIKE ads. It's not that we don't like ads, we just don't like ads when they are out of place.
- The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.
- Bill Cosby (1937 - )
- Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
- If people aren't going to talk about your product, then it's not good enough.
- Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.
- Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
- You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
- Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
- Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
- Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
- Advertisements... contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826), Letter to Nathaniel Macon, January 12, 1819
- I read no newspaper now but Ritchie's, and in that chiefly the advertisements, for they contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
- What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.
- Advice:
- Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties.
- It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.
- Anne Tyler (1941 - ), Celestial Navigation, 1974
- People who ask our advice almost never take it. Yet we should never refuse to give it, upon request, for it often helps us to see our own way more clearly.
- Ask advice only of your equals.
- Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it.
- Don't give advice. It will come back and bite you in the [butt]. Don't take anyone's advice. So, my advice to you is to be true to yourself and everything will be fine.
- Write down the advice of him who loves you, though you like it not at present.
- Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
- Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.
- I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
- Never give advice unless asked.
- Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it.
- There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
- The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to set people right.
- I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.
- The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.
- Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
- The advice of friends must be received with a judicious reserve; we must not give ourselves up to it and follow it blindly, whether right or wrong.
- Many receive advice, few profit by it.
- Publilius Syrus (~100 BC), Maxims
- Advice is very easy to give, and even easier not to follow, so I don't fool with it.
- It seems that bad advice that's fun will always be better known than than good advice that's dull-no matter how useless that fun advice is.
- Scott Berkun, Confessions of a Public Speaker, 2009
- Never take the advice of someone who has not had your kind of trouble.
- In giving advice, seek to help, not please, your friend.
- Never advise anyone to go to war or to marry.
