"The greatest mystery is unsheathed reality itself."

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

We can smile, breathe, walk, and eat our meals in a way that allows us to be in touch with the abundance of happiness that is available. We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive. Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment.

I was sick to the bone of disappearing by degrees, dissolving into library walls, playing my sad little violin of loneliness as time’s invisible ink wrote out my meaningless days even as it erased them. We imaginary people must live the Adventure passionately, set ourselves down with the liquefied marrow of Experience, or else lament the Moment’s passing with a whimper as our unrecorded voices are swallowed by silence.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be.