Eric Maisel Quotes

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

Eric Maisel

#2. When you flow like water you bring all of your talents and resources to your creative work ... Flow around every obstacle you encounter, including any you've erected yourself.

Eric Maisel

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. Creativity is the gift that keeps on giving.

Eric Maisel

#7. The artist, busy and unsettled, can find a moment's peace - and even whole-being rejuvenation - by quietly attuning to a red sky, a gray sky, a black sky, a blue sky.

Eric Maisel

#8. It is in an artist's real interest to congratulate herself more often: not out of narcissism, but in her role as her own dear friend and advocate.

Eric Maisel

#9. 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.

Eric Maisel

#10. Artists disbelieve and dispute society's most cherished notions.

Eric Maisel

#11. An artist's fine goal is to manifest a well-nigh heroic self-discipline, carefully attending to all that concerns him.

Eric Maisel

#12. Creativity is the marriage humanity makes with eternity.

Eric Maisel

#13. The artist ... may suppose that ideas are his chief currency; but unless he is also attuned to feelings, in life and in art, he will not move his fellow human beings.

Eric Maisel

#14. Deconstruction is great for the intellect, but it hurts the heart terribly.

Eric Maisel

#15. The result may be important but it's not the actual measure. The measure is the feeling you have made contact with something.

Eric Maisel

#16. The artist's personality, built upon strong desires and compassionate vision, is by its nature prone to depression.

Eric Maisel

#17. A creative block is a fear about the future, a guess about the dangers dwelling in the dark computer and the locked studio.

Eric Maisel

#18. An ability to choose is a necessity for the artist.

Eric Maisel

#19. One visit with a child can supply us with enough creativity dust to last for a lifetime ... Visit with children like you're the child you ought to be more often.

Eric Maisel

#20. Let each of us dream of a community of artists and work to make that dream a reality.

Eric Maisel

#21. There are an infinite number of rewards you could bestow on yourself for working at your creative projects, and you deserve every one of them.

Eric Maisel

#22. 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.

Eric Maisel

#23. The strange, unbeautiful face beautiful in its ugliness; the perfect, beautiful face ugly in its perfection.

Eric Maisel

#24. To obsess too virulently is to walk alone in anxiety. But to obsess too little is to wall oneself off from one's own creativity.

Eric Maisel

#25. An inability to choose is a hallmark of anxiety ... The too-anxious artist, afraid to choose, will halt dead in the water.

Eric Maisel

#26. 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

#27. Creativity requires introspection, self-examination, and a willingness to take risks. Because of this, artists are perhaps more susceptible to self-doubt and despair than those who do not court the creative muses.

Eric Maisel

#28. I am a human being and an artist: I really, simply, surely am.

Eric Maisel

#29. You can sweat by not practicing or you can pick up your clarinet. There's good sweat and there's bad sweat.

Eric Maisel

#30. Because she favours solitude and indwelling, an artist can live a significantly more claustrophobic life that she had ever intended.

Eric Maisel

#31. All space is space in which to create.

Eric Maisel

#32. The artist who pictures sounds as colours, who feels the difference in microns between one sea green and another ... is not attending to what the world considers important.

Eric Maisel

#33. An alive piece of art may be more alive than much of its audience, and with this odd truth artists must make peace.

Eric Maisel

#34. We have enough experiences in a day to make art for a decade.

Eric Maisel

#35. The more sophisticated we become - as we pierce reality and see the void beyond - the more our sense of wonder is destroyed, along with our reasons for being.

Eric Maisel

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

Eric Maisel

#37. Creativity is part sweat - not just beads of it, but sometimes buckets.

Eric Maisel

#38. The artist must possess at least as much conviction as does his enemy, the dogmatic, mealy-mouthed, anti-art bigot.

Eric Maisel

#39. Creativity is not a talent or ability. It is the fruit of a person's decision to matter.

Eric Maisel

#40. Rekindling hope, engaging in inner work, and venturing into the world amount to a complete plan for picking yourself up when you're down.

Eric Maisel

#41. 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

#42. We can carve time out of thin air, or we can fill up even infinite stretches of time with nothingness. These are our choices.

Eric Maisel

#43. While it may feel natural to devote yourself to your creative work and succumb to feelings of separation and alienation, it nevertheless isn't a terrific idea in terms of your overall happiness and health.

Eric Maisel

#44. The artist's task is to become a successful eccentric, a strange but wise duck able to venture out of solitary confinement and mingle among society.

Eric Maisel

#45. Hurray for criticism, if it means that an artist's voice is heard. Let the wise artist invite criticism and survive it when it comes.

Eric Maisel

#46. An artist ... must actively caress wonder: for fascination, like the desire to play, can be eradicated by the rigors of living.

Eric Maisel

#47. If, because of anxiety and self-doubt, you procrastinate and only think about working, you'll feel more exhausted than if you'd created for hours.

Eric Maisel

#48. It is the job of each artist to believe in the possibility of meaningful, substantial, and sustainable change.

Eric Maisel

#49. Ambition is vital, but dangerous: it is a keen motive and a driving force, but over what edge can it drive the artist?

Eric Maisel

#50. 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

#51. Make creativity your religion ... because creating is soulful work.

Eric Maisel

#52. Boredom is the thing that regularly arrives between excitements and episodes of meaning: it is as natural as the tides, and in it an artist can drown.

Eric Maisel

#53. An artist must struggle to accept the shape of this universe - and achieve some important successes ...

Eric Maisel

#54. Artists are often poignantly careless about making and keeping friends.

Eric Maisel

#55. It goes against an artist's grain to retire. But whether he retires or not, he will age ... What work will get done in the remaining time? ... Can he find a little peace in this twilight? Or must he still rush on, restlessly and hungrily, to the very end?

Eric Maisel

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

Eric Maisel

#57. Dream, but expect nothing. Desire, but expect nothing. Hope, but expect nothing. Release your need to control and gain real control.

Eric Maisel

#58. I am one powerful self made up of so many selves that sometimes I throw myself a get-acquainted party.

Eric Maisel

#59. A wild person with a calm mind can make anything.

Eric Maisel

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

Eric Maisel

#61. The middle way cannot be achieved by dividing two extremes in half.

Eric Maisel

#62. The wise artist makes peace with the fact that he will understand less than he had anticipated.

Eric Maisel

#63. Remind yourself of the value of detaching from work that's out of your hands and committing to new work that wants to be born.

Eric Maisel

#64. A time comes, after years in the trenches, when the artist begins to fathom what his career has looked like so far and what it will look like if he continues as he's proceeded.

Eric Maisel

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

Eric Maisel

#66. An essential aspect of self-support is to remind yourself that success is not measurable, but a matter of feeling.

Eric Maisel

#67. 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.

Eric Maisel

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

Eric Maisel

#69. Do I doubt the painting I've just painted because it is not right or because I can never like what I do?

Eric Maisel

#70. A composition is an arrangement, built out of parts, that aims at seamlessness.

Eric Maisel

#71. Affirmations are not bound up in rules. An affirmation can be long or short, poetic or plain. If you love a phrase and find that it helps you, that is a valid affirmation.

Eric Maisel

#72. Write, even if you have a twinge, a doubt, a fear, a block, a noisy neighbor, a sick cat, thirteen unpublished stories, and a painful boil.

Eric Maisel

#73. Artists have wild desires and a terrible hunger to achieve ... Without it they haven't the juice for striving or loving. But desire also can make them greedy and turn dreams into unrealizable obsessions.

Eric Maisel

#74. 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

#75. While artists fervently believe that the art marketplace was invented by the devil and remains in his henchman's hands, they have no choice but to carry long spoons and sup there.

Eric Maisel

#76. Abstraction is itself an abstract word and has no single meaning ... Every word in our language is abstract, because it represents something else.

Eric Maisel

#77. Settle into mystery as you would settle into your most comfortable chair. Listen. Have visions. Lose yourself.

Eric Maisel

#78. To decide to reach for this blue and not that one, to switch styles or subject matter, to move, in the middle of a sentence, in one direction or another, to commit to this book when that one is also calling, are the sorts of choices that artists must make if they are to function.

Eric Maisel

#79. Go directly to work' means ... when an idea strikes, you drop everything and when your work bell tolls, you answer it.

Eric Maisel

#80. Almost nothing beautiful or brilliant happens unless a person has thought about it a lot.

Eric Maisel

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

Eric Maisel

#82. An artist feels vulnerable to begin with; and yet the only answer is to recklessly discard more armour.

Eric Maisel

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

Eric Maisel

#84. Talent is so loaded a word, so full to the brim with meanings, that an artist might be wise to forget about it altogether and just keep on working.

Eric Maisel

#85. If you create you will also wait, and while you're waiting you will want to be patient but not idle ... responses from the world often take a long time.

Eric Maisel

#86. Isn't today a day to devote to craft? Isn't tomorrow? Isn't every day, routinely, until the end of time?

Eric Maisel

#87. Who knows how many artists fail because the light that shines through them is defracted in a thousand directions and not concentrated in a single beam?

Eric Maisel

#88. The song you write may be beautiful, the research you conceive may be beautiful, but you are the real beauty in life.

Eric Maisel

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

Eric Maisel

#90. Chaos is everywhere - and artists, to fashion art and live truthfully, have no choice but to invite this unwanted guest right into the studio.

Eric Maisel

#91. Because of our fear that we are merely excited matter and the consequent grudge that we hold against the universe, we feel lost and alienated, like a refugee far from home in a universe that cares nothing for us.

Eric Maisel

#92. If you bring your sexual impulses to your creative work ... you'll be working from deep in the genetic code, down where life wants to make new life and feel good in the process.

Eric Maisel

#93. You can't plan in advance for everything - every mood swing, every mistake you might make in execution, every shift in your circumstances. But you can keep updating your plan ...

Eric Maisel

#94. A long, deep breath is the equivalent of a full stop and the key to centering.

Eric Maisel

#95. 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

#96. The artist must reckon with his own character flaws, which do not disappear just because he has been called to be an artist.

Eric Maisel

#97. Even though we require flexibility to negotiate our changing circumstances, we are rather built to anxiously turn away from alternatives.

Eric Maisel

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

Eric Maisel

#99. Art is manipulation, the management of material, the directing of fate ... Who does that directing?

Eric Maisel

#100. Affirmations need to be used if they are to become incorporated into the fabric of your being.

Eric Maisel