Once we commit to action, the worst thing we can do is to stop. What will keep us from stopping? Plain old stubbornness. I like the idea of stubbornness because it’s less lofty than tenacity or persev...
Man is weak, greedy, craven, lustful, prey to every species of vice and depravity. He will lie, steal, cheat, murder, melt down the very statues of the gods and coin their gold as money for whores. Th...
If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist? chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to...
He is on a mission. He will not tolerate disorder. He eliminates chaos from his world in order to banish it from his mind. He wants the carpet vacuumed and the threshold swept, so the Muse may enter a...
From that day, I vowed never to squander a moment's care over the good opinion of others. May they rot in hell. You have heard of my abstemiousness in matters of food and sex. Here is why: I punished...
Every virtue that reaches the exaggeration, is becoming a defect
Each man recalls not the enemy he hated, but the champion who engaged him with such valor.
Do you understand? I hadn't written anything good. It might be years before I would, if I ever did at all. That didn't matter. What counted was that I had, after years of running from it, actually sat...
Bagger Vance: Don't make no sense is all... Man say he don't play no golf when he out here this shade of night hittin balls off in the dark where he can't even see 'em... Rannulph Junuh: Yep... Well,...
At least twice a week, I pause in the rush of work and have a meeting with myself. (If I were part of a team, I’d call a team meeting.) I ask myself, again, of the project: What is this damn thing abo...
Performing the commonplace under uncommonplace conditions.
You’re supposed to learn that things that you think are nothing, as weightless as air, are actually powerful substantial forces, as real and as solid as earth. I understood. The eagle was telling me...
You imagined we had entered unknown country, my friend, when we voyaged across the sea to Amazonia. Yet that was nothing beside the frontier I cross each evening with this woman who is my equal. Each...
When we're living as amateurs, we're running away from our calling — meaning our work, our destiny, the obligation to become our truest and highest selves.
We slew three hundred of them, replied Artemisia, and it took two million of us to do it. These
We know that if we embrace our ideals, we must prove worthy of them. And that scares the hell out of us.
We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are. More than our parents/children/teachers think we are. We fear that we actually possess the talent that our still, small voice tells us. That...
Theseus overturned this by a single stroke: he moved the sessions outdoors, to the hill of the Pnyx, where the people could attend and observe their betters. What a revolution this affected! Before,
The sword master stepping onto the fighting floor knows he will be facing powerful opponents. Not the physical adversaries whom he will fight (though those indeed serve as stand-ins for the enemy). Th...
The sure sign of an amateur is he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow.