Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

Bertrand Russell, “The Conquest of Happiness” (via misswallflower)

That’s how you know you love someone, I guess, when you can’t experience anything without wishing the other person were there to see it, too.

Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants (via feellng)

coffee stain motorcycles

A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.

Louis Nizer (via observando)

I don’t think you do. Mastery is elusive—there’s always someone who’s going to come around and kick your ass. That’s what keeps you moving and getting better.

Honestly, I’d worry more about the people who hit big in their early 20s than yourself. Look at Orson Welles. He made Citizen Kane when he was 26 or something. When you peak early, there’s nowhere to go but down.

Compare to Alice Munro, whose retirement is covered in the NYTimes today:

She pursued her career with unusual discipline, faithfully completing her quota of pages every day while also raising three daughters and helping her first husband, James Munro, run a bookshop, and persisted, despite not winning much early recognition. Her first collection came out only in 1968, when she was 37, and her work didn’t attract attention outside Canada until it began appearing in The New Yorker in the late ’70s.

Samuel L. Jackson was 45 when Pulp Fiction came out. Etc.

I forget who I’m plagiarizing from, but there’s a curve of talent that evens out after a while—people with talent get a jump on everybody, but the rest of us can catch up through slow years of persistence.

There’s a whole book about this I have on my shelf that I haven’t read yet called Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.

Ask me anything you can’t Google.

Was playing around with my camera and some broken glass, and I captured this. (OC)

The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (via austinkleon)

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Ira Glass (via nefffy)

Just start the sentence…and see what happens. This is how we write.

Jincy Willett (via observando)

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

E. B. White (via quotesforintellectuals)

“Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”

― Albert Einstein (via psych-quotes)

No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (via observando)

Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don’t show up. They want to be missed when they’re gone.

In another excellent episode of NPR’s TED Radio Hour, Seth Godin dispenses some of his signature wisdom in discussing what makes a great leader. (David Foster Wallace had similar ideas.)

Pair with Godin on vulnerability, creative courage, and how to dance with the fear.

(via explore-blog)