Eric Maisel > Quotes

“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

“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

“Almost nothing beautiful or brilliant happens unless a person has thought about it a lot.”
― Eric Maisel

“Write, even if you have a twinge, a doubt, a fear, a block, a noisy neighbor, a sick cat, thirteen unpublished stories, and a painful boil.”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

“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

“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

“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

“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!

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Picture a litter of kittens. One is more curious than the next. One is more aggressive than the next. One is a leader, and another is a follower. The first is not potentially curious; she is already curious. The second is not potentially aggressive; he is already aggressive. The third and the fourth are not potentially leaders and followers; they are already that. In exactly the same way a human infant is not potentially smart; he is already smart.”
― Eric Maisel, Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

“How you conceptualize meaning matters. If you hold that it is outside of yourself and must be tracked down, you have one idea of meaning. If, however, you conceive of it as I've been describing it—that it is a subjective experience, that it sometimes comes unbidden and that it can also be coaxed into existence, that when it is absent we must try to create it rather than search for it, and so on—then you are holding a very different idea of meaning. It should go without saying that what sort of idea you hold about meaning matters a great deal—in fact, it completely dictates how you will live your life. How you construe meaning dictates how you will live your life. The way you construe meaning affects everything, from how much pleasure you get from ordinary things to how sincere an effort you make in manifesting your values and your principles. I think that the idea of meaning that I'm promoting, by being true-to-life and by returning meaning to your hands, will help you live more intentionally, more richly, and more happily. Be that as it may, you get to form your idea of meaning—and
whatever you decide about meaning dictates how you will live. Remember that life is not set up to meet our meaning needs. It only sporadically provides us with the experience of meaning.”
― Eric Maisel, Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

“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

“Man, in this view, is incapable of looking around him and acknowledging without wincing or worse, without falling down in despair, that he doesn't know anything about ultimate reality. In this view, man is simply too small for such acknowledgments. He fears that he might stop hoping or caring if he learned that the universe was perhaps indifferent to him. Could he feel gratitude for his existence or awe in the face of a starry sky if he suspected that he was neither designed nor loved? He thinks not. Therefore he opts for mysticism.”
― Eric Maisel, Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

“That hundreds of millions of people believe that a man named Noah built an ark and put all of the world's species onto it two-by-two, that those species included dinosaurs—even though dinosaurs and man are separated by millions of years—that these people want this taught as science, that they want to get onto every school board and into every legislature to ensure that their view prevails, and that the mainstream media of a modern society
continues to take this seriously, may only mildly annoy one smart person, perhaps one who grew up in religion and is tempted to give religion a pass. But it will seriously outrage—and almost derange—another smart person
who is convinced that these views always come with an authoritarian edge and a coercive public agenda. It will likewise strike a smart person as a ludicrous claim that the collectivist farms in her country are working beautifully when there is no food to be found on the shelves of any grocery store anywhere or to claim that a
certain corporation is a mighty source for good and innovation when it is paying its employees peanuts and freely polluting. Misrepresentations of this sort affect our brain and our nervous system. They are an assault on
our senses as well as our sense of right and wrong, and they bring pain and distress.”
― Eric Maisel, Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

“You do not want to avoid creating just because creating or the prospect of creating is making you anxious.”
― Eric Maisel, Unleashing the Artist Within: Breaking through Blocks and Restoring Creative Purpose

“But at heart what we are talking about is not pathology but an intense conflictual knowing, a knowing that we are worthy smacking up against a knowing that we are just passing through: a knowing, that is, that we matter and that we do not matter. This is a true and not a pathological understanding. Every smart person possesses this understanding and can't help but feel distressed by this understanding.”
― Eric Maisel, Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

“We see how boredom arises as a special, terrible problem for smart people. A smart person has a lively brain; that brain wants to work; it is primed to think; and if you give it nothing to do, it will do nothing for as long as it can bear to do nothing, but it will not be happy. It will be bored and, worse, begin to doubt the meaningfulness of life.”
― Eric Maisel, Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

“First and foremost, she recognizes that life has no single or ultimate meaning. Life only has human meanings of the following sort: psychological experiences of meaning, fleeting moments of meaning, best guesses about
meaning, constructed ideas about meaning, personal evaluations about the meaningfulness of life, and so on. This may strike her as terrible news or as wonderful news, but in either case, she is smart enough to know that it is the truth. She accepts this truth, embraces it, and makes considered choices in the realm of meaning—so as to give herself the best possible chance of crafting a life that feels authentic.”
― Eric Maisel, Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

“A smart person ought to be smart enough to see clearly the limitations of his species.”
― Eric Maisel, Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

“The ascending spiral, one of the central images of early American letters and employed especially by Emerson, is probably an unconscious piece of every American's personal mythology. Its shorthand name is progress.”
― Eric Maisel