Do Not Fear Mistakes

“I know what the power of silence is. When I used to play in clubs, everybody was loud; there was a lot of noise. So I would take my mute off the microphone, and I would play something so soft that you could hardly hear it.”

“It’s not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.”

“Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”

“Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherf*cker who plays it is 80 percent.”

“Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.”

“Do not fear mistakes. There are none.”

All quotes by Miles Davis

The Golden Opportunity

“Do not waste time dreaming of great faraway opportunities; do the best you can where you are. Open your petals of power and beauty and fling out the fragrance of your life in the place that has been assigned to you.”

“There is inestimable blessing in a cheerful spirit. When the soul throws its windows wide open, letting in the sunshine, and presenting to all who see it the evidence of its gladness, it is not only happy, but it has an unspeakable power of doing good.”

“Don’t wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great.”

“A will finds a way.”

“Enthusiasm will steady the heart and strengthen the will; it will give force to the thought and nerve to the hand until what was only a possibility becomes a reality.”

“Our destiny changes with our thought; we shall become what we wish to become, do what we wish to do, when our habitual thought corresponds with our desire.”

“The golden opportunity you are seeking is in yourself. It is not in your environment; it is not in luck or chance, or the help of others; it is in yourself alone.”

“Our thoughts and imagination are the only real limits to our possibilities.”

“We make the world we live in and shape our own environment.”

All quotes by Orison Swett Marden

The End You Live For

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.”

“We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.”

“The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.”

“We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.”

“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.”

“A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.”

“We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness.”

All quotes by Thomas Merton

“Most people live in almost total darkness… people, millions of people whom you will never see, who don’t know you, never will know you, people who may try to kill you in the morning, live in a darkness which — if you have that funny terrible thing which every artist can recognize and no artist can define — you are responsible to those people to lighten, and it does not matter what happens to you. You are being used in the way a crab is useful, the way sand certainly has some function. It is impersonal. This force which you didn’t ask for, and this destiny which you must accept, is also your responsibility. And if you survive it, if you don’t cheat, if you don’t lie, it is not only, you know, your glory, your achievement, it is almost our only hope — because only an artist can tell, and only artists have told since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad. Hymns don’t do this, churches really cannot do it. The trouble is that although the artist can do it, the price that he has to pay himself and that you, the audience, must also pay, is a willingness to give up everything, to realize that although you spent twenty-seven years acquiring this house, this furniture, this position, although you spent forty years raising this child, these children, nothing, none of it belongs to you. You can only have it by letting it go. You can only take if you are prepared to give, and giving is not an investment. It is not a day at the bargain counter. It is a total risk of everything, of you and who you think you are, who you think you’d like to be, where you think you’d like to go — everything, and this forever, forever.”

Quote by James Baldwin, from the book The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings

The Path is Clear – Ride the Storm

Something Wonderfully Bold

“Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns…We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.”

“Pain is not wrong. Reacting to pain as wrong initiates the trance of unworthiness. The moment we believe something is wrong, our world shrinks and we lose ourselves in the effort to combat the pain.”

“Attention is the most basic form of love. By paying attention we let ourselves be touched by life , and our hearts naturally become more open and engaged.”

“Charlotte Joko Beck, Zen teacher and author, teaches that the “secret” of spiritual life is the capacity to “… return to that which we have spent a lifetime hiding from, to rest in the bodily experience of the present moment—even if it is a feeling of being humiliated, of failing, of abandonment, of unfairness.” Through the sacred art of pausing, we develop the capacity to stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience. We begin to trust in our natural intelligence, in our naturally wise heart, in our capacity to open to whatever arises. Like awakening from a dream, in the moment of pausing our trance recedes and Radical Acceptance becomes possible.”

“There is something wonderfully bold and liberating about saying yes to our entire imperfect and messy life.”

All quotes by Tara Brach

A Million Really Exciting Things

“For everything bad, there’s a million really exciting things, whether it’s someone puts out a really great book, there’s a new movie, there’s a new detective, the sky is unbelievably golden, or you have the best cup of coffee you ever had in your life.”

“If I’ve learned one thing in life, it’s not to be so judgmental of other people.”

“An artist may have burdens the ordinary citizen doesn’t know, but the ordinary citizen has burdens that many artists never even touch.”

“Nothing is a hobby – each discipline is its own world with its own high standards. Of course, every artist has ‘minor works’ that they do, but I don’t think I have any ‘minor disciplines.'”

“I think we have a creative impulse where suffering can magnify our work, but so can joy. You can be in love and write the greatest love song ever. Sometimes I think too much suffering makes it difficult to do one’s work.”

“I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I’m writing a poem or drawing, I’m not a female; I’m an artist.”

All quotes by Patti Smith