Robert Grudin Quotes

#1. Happiness may well consist primarily of an attitude toward time.

Robert Grudin

#2. Written truth is four-dimensional. If we consult it at the wrong time, or read it at the wrong place, it is as empty and shapeless as a dress on a hook.

Robert Grudin

#3. The reason so many promises are not kept is the same as the reason they are made in the first place.

Robert Grudin

#4. Creativity is dangerous. We cannot open ourselves to new insights without endangering the security of our prior assumptions. We cannot propose new ideas without risking disapproval and rejection.

Robert Grudin

#5. Because we believe that one moment is more or less like the next, we lose touch with the essential urgency of the present, the fact that each passing moment is the one moment for the practice of freedom.

Robert Grudin

#6. The happy individual is able to renew daily and with full consciousness all the basic expressions of human identity: work, love, communication, play, and rest.

Robert Grudin

#7. Every home should have a room, or at least a nook with two chairs, where it is a sin punishable by immediate expulsion to speak of money, business, politics or the state of one's teeth.

Robert Grudin

#8. No psychological message is so open to question as that which tells us that we have nothing left to do or to give.

Robert Grudin

#9. Like students of art who walk around a great statue, seeing parts and aspects of it from each position, but never the whole, we must walk mentally around time, using a variety of approaches, a pandemonium of metaphor.

Robert Grudin

#10. True teachers not only impart knowledge and method but awaken the love of learning by their own reflected love.

Robert Grudin

#11. Like gravity, beauty is a force whose existence is inferred from its apparent effects.

Robert Grudin

#12. Great drama, like the energy implicit in every atom, is eternally around and within us, but liberated only by coincidence, ceremony, creativity, periods reaching completion, pressures reaching the bursting point, and the simple but painful cultivation of awareness.

Robert Grudin

#13. All great experience has a guarded entrance and a windowless facade.

Robert Grudin

#14. We are wistful about the golden days of the past and dream of a distant future unclouded by necessity. But I suspect that if our inner souls were asked what in life they really missed, the answer would be primal danger and stress.

Robert Grudin

#15. Excellence of mind itself, rightly conceived, is expertise in beauty; creativity is wise love.

Robert Grudin

#16. The mind which can totally and inanely forget its work and obligations is often also the mind which can, at the proper time, give them the fullest attention.

Robert Grudin

#17. The future is like the daytime moon, a diffident but faithful companion, so elegant as to be almost invisible, an inconspicuous marvel.

Robert Grudin

#18. At pains to define liberty, that most resolute of indefinables, our minds fall back on spatial images; on birds, sailboats, and mountains; the untethered balloon, the blue sky, the nude figure.

Robert Grudin

#19. Psychologically time is seldom homogenous but rather is as full of shapes as space.

Robert Grudin

#20. Those who labor for bread or money alone are condemned to their reward.

Robert Grudin

#21. Because it is a radical act of freedom, creative achievement is a heroic process that requires, in all its permutations, specific strengths of character.

Robert Grudin

#22. The recalling of beautiful things, whether they are your own experiences or the acheivements of others, is a creative act. Simple ideas can be restated by rote; but profound ideas must be recreated by will and imagination.

Robert Grudin

#23. You may cure yourself of a depression by forcing yourself to perform, in rapid order and with excruciating concentration, half a dozen or so unpleasant chores, especially if they have long been postponed. This is a kind of homeopathic purgative, a treatment of like with like.

Robert Grudin

#24. Plans made swiftly and intuitively are likely to have flaws. Plans made carefully and comprehensively are sure to.

Robert Grudin

#25. Truth is rhythmical: if it implies stasis, it is platitude. Truth is syncopated: if it supplies all the terms, there is one term too many. Truth is barbed: if it comforts, it lies. Truth is an armed dancer.

Robert Grudin

#26. We commonly think of freedom as the ability to define alternatives and choose between them. The creative mind exceeds this liberty in being able to redefine itself and reality at large, generating whole new sets of alternatives.

Robert Grudin

#27. Individuals we consider happy commonly seem complete in the present and we see them constantly in their wholeness: attentive, cheerful, open rather than closed to events, integral in the moment rather than distended across time by regret or anxiety.

Robert Grudin

#28. The extent to which we live from day to day, from week to week, intent on details and oblivious to larger presences, is a gauge of our impoverishment in time.

Robert Grudin

#29. We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day.

Robert Grudin

#30. In the landscape of time, there are few locations less comfortable than that of one who waits for some person or event to arrive at some unknown moment in the future.

Robert Grudin

#31. The fundamental motive of true teaching is the love that seeks and studies and performs.

Robert Grudin

#32. We pamper the present like a spoiled child, obeying its superficial demands but ignoring its real needs.

Robert Grudin

#33. Such self-transformation is the most difficult and dangerous challenge to the imagination, and it is the most rewarding. Meeting it is only possible for the person whose mind is open to contradictions and well-practiced in free conjecture.

Robert Grudin

#34. Fast drivers can see no further than slow drivers, but they must look further down the road to time their reactions safely. Similarly, people with great projects afoot habitually look further and more clearly into the future than people who are mired in day-to-day concerns.

Robert Grudin

#35. The goal of discoverers is not to outdistance their peers, but to transcend themselves.

Robert Grudin