Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness
“Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table
“When Video Arts asked me if I’d like to talk about creativity I said ‘no problem!’ No problem! Because telling people how to be creative is easy, it’s only being it that’s difficult.”
John Cleese, “Lecture on Creativity”
“One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious. When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something (if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things.”
Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
“In New York, a citizen is likely to keep on the move, shopping for the perfect arrangement of rooms and vistas, changing his habitation according to fortune, whim, and need. And in every place he abandons he leaves something vital, it seems to me, and starts his new life somewhat less encrusted, like a lobster that has shed its skin and is for a time soft and vulnerable.”
E. B. White, “Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street”
“One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, ‘This end is more important than the other.'”
John Cage, Silence
“I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way—things I had no words for.”
Georgia O’Keeffe, interview in the 1977 documentary Georgia O’Keeffe
“There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man’s spice-box seasons his own food.”
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
