CREATIVITY AND OTHER LIFE QUALITIES: "People With the Interesting Answers, Are Those Who Ask the Interesting Questions"

Thursday

"People With the Interesting Answers, Are Those Who Ask the Interesting Questions"

Maxfield Parrish, Daybreak

A few quotes from Art & Fear--Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of ARTMAKING. Because learning and growing in our relationships with others and ourselves are accomplished through a number of creative processes, the messages within these quotes are relevant not only to the arts, but to the work we all do, living our lives from one season to the next, facing challenges, discovering insights and inspiration. So I thought I'd offer them for comment or contemplation below. Perhaps you have a few you'd like to add?

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead. ~Gene Fowler

Artists don't get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working. ~Stephen DeStaebler

When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss money. ~Oscar Wilde

To see far is one thing: Going there is another. ~Brancusi

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college--that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?" ~Howard Ikemoto

The answers you gt depend upon the questions you ask. ~Thomas Kuhn

When you start on a long journey, trees are trees, water is water, and mountains are mountains. After you have gone some distance, trees are no longer trees, water no longer water, mountains no longer mountains. But after you have traveled a great distance, trees are once again trees, water is once again water, mountains are once again mountains. ~Zen Teaching

Computers are useless--all they can give you are answers. ~Pablo Picasso

Over the long run, the people with the interesting answers are those who ask the interesting questions. ~Bayles and Orland

Peace and all good,
Diane

Diane Solis

The poetry of Diane Solis has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, excerpted in Expressive Writing: Classroom and Community, and has been published or is forthcoming in literary journals and magazines, including, America, Big Muddy, The Healing Muse, Hobo Camp Review, The Lost Country, Psychological Perspectives, Sinister Wisdom, Slink Chunk Press and elsewhere. Her chapbook ART SPIRITS, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. A science writer and technical editor by trade, Solis practices contemplative and Zen forms of meditation and travels to remote places to photograph and write about the "wild" she encounters there. She resides on the Central Pacific Coast with her partner.

www.dmsolis.blogspot.com

The Latest Quotes for Contemplation:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. --Annie Dillard

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, age after age, forever. ~ Tagore

I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world.... ~ Frank O'Hara

Of all fires love is the only inexhaustible one. ~Pablo Neruda

Prophets are so dangerous because they cry in season and out of season, politely and impolitely, loud and long. ~Joan Chittister

When I say be creative, I don't mean you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem. ~ Osho

There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier? ~ Mary Oliver

Without warning, as a whirlwind swoops on an oak, Love shakes my heart. ~ Sappho

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
T.S. Eliot, from "Little Gidding"

Love many things, for therein lies your true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well... ~ Vincent van Gogh

I have found that to love and be loved is the most empowering and exhilarating of all human emotions. ~ Jane Goodall

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone--we find it with another. ~Thomas Merton

I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for our victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.
~John F. Kennedy

I cannot write convincingly about anything that I am not passionate about. ~Darrell Bourque, Poet Laureate of Louisiana

In the lover's heart is a lute which plays the melody of longing. ~Rumi

But perhaps the most important thing about my father was that he taught us the simplest things -- Navajo things -- like how to just sit and be quiet, to blend in and watch, or to move so silently we'd become a part of the forest. My father taught us how to live the concepts of our culture, especially the importance of communicating with the natural world. ~Lori Arviso Alvord, M.D.