Eric Maisel Quotes
Life is too short not to create, not to love, and not to lend a helping hand to our brothers and sisters.
Dream, but expect nothing. Desire, but expect nothing. Hope, but expect nothing. Release your need to control and gain real control.
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.
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.
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.
The artist's personality, built upon strong desires and compassionate vision, is by its nature prone to depression.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Humanitarian convictions are the linchpins of our salvation, and these an artist must champion.
When a thing is not done, continuing to work is the strength; but when it is done, the strength lies in stopping.
An artist... must actively caress wonder: for fascination, like the desire to play, can be eradicated by the rigors of living.
Rekindling hope, engaging in inner work, and venturing into the world amount to a complete plan for picking yourself up when you're down.
An artist feels vulnerable to begin with; and yet the only answer is to recklessly discard more armour.
Chaos is everywhere - and artists, to fashion art and live truthfully, have no choice but to invite this unwanted guest right into the studio.
Almost nothing beautiful or brilliant happens unless a person has thought about it a lot.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The artist must reckon with his own character flaws, which do not disappear just because he has been called to be an artist.
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.
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.
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.
Do I doubt the painting I've just painted because it is not right or because I can never like what I do?
The artist must possess at least as much conviction as does his enemy, the dogmatic, mealy-mouthed, anti-art bigot.
An inability to choose is a hallmark of anxiety... The too-anxious artist, afraid to choose, will halt dead in the water.
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.
Ambition is vital, but dangerous: it is a keen motive and a driving force, but over what edge can it drive the artist?
Affirmations need to be used if they are to become incorporated into the fabric of your being.
An alive piece of art may be more alive than much of its audience, and with this odd truth artists must make peace.
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.
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.
An artist's fine goal is to manifest a well-nigh heroic self-discipline, carefully attending to all that concerns him.
