Eric Maisel QUOTES

1 " Almost nothing beautiful or brilliant happens unless a person has thought about it a lot. "

2 " The song you write may be beautiful, the research you conceive may be beautiful, but you are the real beauty in life. "

― Eric Maisel , The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person's Path Through Depression

3 " The result may be important but it’s not the actual measure. The measure is the feeling you have made contact with something. "

― Eric Maisel , The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person's Path Through Depression

4 " If there is a soul, then it is a mistake to think that it is given to us completely created. It is created right here for a lifetime. Life is nothing but a long, painful process of creation. "

― Eric Maisel , The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person's Path Through Depression

5 " Because of our fear that we are merely excited matter and the consequent grudge that we hold against the universe, we feel lost and alienated, like a refugee far from home in a universe that cares nothing for us. "

― Eric Maisel , The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person's Path Through Depression

6 " A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially. "

― Eric Maisel , A Writer's San Francisco: A Guided Journey for the Creative Soul

7 " An essential aspect of self-support is to remind yourself that success is not measurable, but a matter of feeling. "

― Eric Maisel , The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person's Path Through Depression

8 " If you wait for a better time to create, better than this very moment, if you wait until you feel settled, divinely inspired, perfectly centered, unburdened of your usual worries, or free of your own skin, forget about it. You will still be waiting tomorrow and the next day, wondering why you never managed to begin, wondering "

― Eric Maisel , Coaching the Artist Within: Advice for Writers, Actors, Visual Artists, and Musicians from America's Foremost Creativity Coach

9 " Except under dire circumstances or as a day job to support creative endeavors, a smart person is not so likely to want to wait tables, file forms, work on an assembly line, or sell shoes. It isn't that he disparages these lines of work as beneath his dignity; rather, it is that he can see clearly how his days would be experienced as meaningless if he had to spend his time not thinking. "

― Eric Maisel , Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

10 " Creativity is not a talent or ability. It is the fruit of a person’s decision to matter. "

― Eric Maisel , Become a Creativity Coach Now!

11 " Write, even if you have a twinge, a doubt, a fear, a block, a noisy neighbor, a sick cat, thirteen unpublished stories, and a painful boil. "

― Eric Maisel , A Writer's Paris: A Guided Journey For The Creative Soul

12 " Both the biological and psychological approaches are suspect since both posit an unreal world, completely at odds with human experience, in which people do not get depressed for good reasons having to do with their experience in life and their uneasiness about the facts of existence. Rather, people only get depressed because something in them is flawed or broken. Depression of any magnitude, these approaches claim, is always an illness and never a reaction to being dropped, willy-nilly, into a world not of their making, which they are forced to make mean something. "

― Eric Maisel , The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person's Path Through Depression

13 " That as a smart person, whose brain races faster and harder than the next person's, you can't accomplish something like stopping your racing mind from worrying doesn't mean that you have a disorder or that you are a failure. "

― Eric Maisel , Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

14 " We have arrived at an interesting moment in the evolution of our species when a smart person in a first-world culture is pestered by two contradictory feelings: first that he is as special a creature as nature has yet produced
and second that he's not very special at all, just excited matter here for a while and off again into universal dark matter. This first feeling inflates him and makes him want to puff out his chest and preen a bit. This second feeling makes him want to crawl in a hole, act carelessly, or sit inert on the sofa. How unfortunate for a creature to be buffeted in such contradictory ways! These twin feelings lead a person to the following pair of conclusions: that while he is perhaps quite smart, he is nevertheless rather like a cockroach, trapped with a brain that really isn't big enough for his purposes, perhaps trapped in a corner of an academic discipline, a research
field, a literary genre, or in some other small place, trapped by his creatureliness, and trapped by life's very smallness. I would like to dub this the god-bug syndrome: the prevalent and perhaps epidemic feeling of greatness walking hand-in-hand with smallness that plagues so many people today. "

― Eric Maisel , Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

15 " How can a person brim over with life energy and big plans one moment and feel suicidal the next? She can cycle exactly that way because of the god-bug syndrome. "

― Eric Maisel , Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

16 " A smart person is even more likely to suppose that his brain is equal to the challenges he faces, even such frankly impossible ones. What a setup to send your brain racing! And what will it do when, racing, it realizes the magnitude of its challenges and the extent to which they can't be solved just by thinking? It will worry. "

― Eric Maisel , Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

17 " The primary challenge that smart people must deal with is making sense of meaning. Natural psychology suggests that the best answer to this problem is donning the mantle of meaning-maker and engaging in value-based meaning-making. No smart person is immune to this problem. In fact, it is the most significant emotional issue for our smartest 15 percent. "

― Eric Maisel , Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

18 " Smartness is a smart person's defining characteristic. Everything she thinks about the world—how she forms her identity, how she construes her needs, how she talks to herself about her life purposes and goals—is a function of how her particular brain operates. She is her smartness in a way that she is not her height, her gender, her moods, or her experiences. Her particular mind with its particular intelligence is the lens through which she looks at life, and it is also the engine that drives her days and her nights. It is her idiosyncratic brain, mind, and intelligence that determine how she will live—and why. An "

― Eric Maisel , Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

19 " Meaning is primarily a subjective psychological experience. A smart person is more likely than the next person to be aware of its absence and to be affected by its absence. He is more likely to get bored, to experience meaninglessness, to begin to see the extent to which neither his society nor the universe are built to satisfy his meaning needs, and to then hunt for soothing or exciting meaning substitutes that ultimately reduce his freedom. Meaning is a smart person's most difficult challenge. "

― Eric Maisel , Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

20 " We are the sort of creature who not only needs to put up firewood and food for the winter but who must also predict the distant future, make decisions about who or what created the universe and what sort of principles and path we should follow, deal with our fellow difficult and dangerous creatures, and in other ways make sense of things that would overtax any creature. "

― Eric Maisel , Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

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