Mike Harrison
What makes us wake up in the morning? What makes us travel, study, love, work, meditate, create, sing, dance, help, teach...
Without some kind of inspiration, not much happens. Our inspiration, the heart of our motivation may—more than anything else—determine our path in life, the levels of our success and failure, our happiness, fulfillment, and peace of mind. As Victor Frankyl discovered, “We can always find a how if we have a strong enough why.” But if we don’t connect deeply with a meaningful reason, even the most simple of tasks often prove beyond reach. Woody Allen said that the only words of wisdom that never failed him were “80 percent of success is showing up.” Without inspiration, we can’t really show up—not with undistracted energy and motivation. True inspiration arises from an authentic place in our hearts; pseudo-inspiration from accepted, external values imposed by religion, culture, and the various norms of civilization. True inspiration transforms our lives into works of art; pseudo-inspiration turns us into wage slaves with souls sold to the devils of materialism.
“Take everything that happens as it comes, as something to animate, not to appropriate”
“One moment can change a day, one day can change a life and one life can change the world.”
“Happiness does not come from fame, riches, or virtue. It only arises when posterity—reflecting on our life—believes it to be a life they would wish to live.”
“On, on! Run, dance, delirious, possessed! You, the beauty and grace of golden Tmolus... sing for joy. Like a foal with its mother at pasture, runs and leaps for joy every daughter of Bacchus.”
“Very small is the difference between people and animals. The common person ignores that difference but the wise cultivate it.”
“A person who is shallow aspires to depth; one who is ugly aspires to beauty; one who is narrow aspires to breadth; one who is poor aspires to wealth; one who is humble aspires to esteem. Whatever one lacks in oneself he must seek outside.”
“Sages do good as if they fear there is not enough of it and prepare against calamity as if they fear they cannot avoid it.”
“If my work may be handed down to men who will appreciate it, then though I should suffer a thousand mutilations, what regret should I have?”
“I swore—but was I sober when I swore?
And then and then came Spring, and Rose-in-hand
My thread-bare Penitence a-pieces tore.”
“Like billowing clouds, like the incessant gurgle of the brook, the longing of the spirit can never be stilled.”
“People of accomplishment rarely sit back and let things happen to them. They go out and happen to things.”
“With the active cooperation of enthusiasm and the intellect, inspiration creates marvelous conceptions and all that is excellent and divine come into being.”
“No matter where your interest lies, you will not be able to accomplish anything unless you bring your deepest devotion to it.”
“Ennui is the disease of hearts without feeling, and of minds without resources.”
“Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm. It is the real allegory of the myth of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes. It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.”
“Without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever done.”
“People do not lack strength, they lack will… The ones who live are the ones who struggle; the ones whose soul and heart are filled with high purpose. Yes, these are the living ones.”
“In the twentieth century, war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, animosity will be dead, royalty will be dead, and dogmas will be dead; but Man will live. For all there will be but one country—that country the whole earth; for all there will be but one hope—that hope the whole heaven.”
“Let others complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is paltry; for it lacks passion. Men’s thoughts are thin and flimsy like lace, they are themselves pitiable like the lace-makers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful... Their lusts are dull and sluggish, their passions sleepy.”
“Everything great glitters, glitter begets ambition, and ambition can easily have caused the inspiration or what we thought to be inspiration.”
“The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see thing again in their larger, quiter masses and to believe that we too an be seen and judged in te wholeness of our character.”
“As soon as any art is pursued with a view of money, then farewell—in 99% of cases—to all hope of genuine good work”
“Do not seek illumination unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond.”
“These then are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”
“Bottled Lightning, in truth, is one of our American ideals... a wild-eyed look either of too desparate eagerness and anxiety or of too intense responsiveness and good-will... Intensity, rapidity, vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us something of a nationally accepted ideal”
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
“Men do not lack strength; they lack the will to concentrate and act... Success is voltage under control”
“My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration.”
“Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.”
“The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.”
“When heat, moisture, and fertile soil come together, you do whatever you can to sow grain. When the crops are ready in autumn, you do whatever you can to harvest them... Now that you have a precious human life free of all impediments and endowed with all favorable conditions, apply yourself unrelentingly to spiritual practice!”
“I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken”
“William James used to preach the ‘will to believe.’ For my part, I should wish to preach the ‘will-to-doubt.’ None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.”
“You've only got one life, one youth, and you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to; nothing easier. Most people do that.”
“I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.”
“Create an ocean from a dewdrop. Do not beg for light from the moon, obtain it from the spark within you.”
“When I encounter a sunrise, a painting, a woman, or an idea that makes my heart bound like a young calf, then I know I am standing in front of happiness.”
“Beauty is not a need but an ecstasy... a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.”
“God makes us grubs, and we, by our own efforts, must become butterflies... He sent us the silkworm to point out our way... the grub's yearning to become butterfly always stood at its—and man's—most imperative and at the same time most legitimate duty.”
“It is no discredit to our species that in all ages its curiosity has outrun its wisdom, and its ideals have set an impossible pace for its behavior.”
“If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.”
“The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual, a vitality great beyond all the needs of his own living — an energy which no single life can consume.”
“The best of the most atrocious, zeal is always intoxicating. A world without zeal would be a world deprived of many simple but savage pleasures: but at least half its present excuses for interfering and bullying would have been taken away from it.”
“It is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person.”
“Just as lower organisms serve as building materials for higher ones, so also the stored-up experiences of the subconscious serve the higher purposes of the mind... provided the aim, or the idea that inspired us, was wide enough to include a future beyond the span of one lifetime.”
“Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the whole world.”
“"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was greater than the risk it took to blossom."”
“If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.”
“The continual stream of new discovery and fresh revelation and inspiration which arises at every moment is the manifestation of the eternal youth of the living Dharma and its wonder, splendor and spontaneity. ”
“Perhaps we cannot raise the winds. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it.”
“Nature is an astounding reality. One must constantly keep in mind that coming into contact with true nature can be an overwhelming experience. This is, after all, a world of inspiration that can justly be called the 'Great Spirit.'”
“The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.”
“Having been created in the image God, all human beings have a God-shaped vacuum built into their hearts. Since nature abhors a vacuum, people keep trying to fill the one inside them.”
“We destroy the love of learning… by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards… A's on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean's lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys, in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.”
“As long as you are convinced you have never done anything, you can never do anything.”
“Nothing splendid was ever created in cold blood. Heat is required to forge anything. Every great accomplishment is the story of a flaming heart”
“Sí, se puede" (Spanish for "Yes, one can" or, roughly, "Yes, it can be done")”
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable but so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
“There are times when Lao Tzu sounds very like Henry David Thoreau, but Lao Tzu was kinder…Lao Tzu know that getting all entangled with the external keeps us from the eternal, but he also understands that sometimes people like to get dressed up.”
“Sí, se puede (Spanish for ‘Yes, it is possible’ or, roughly, ‘Yes, one can’)”
“You can imagine Herman Melville coming to his publisher with his new manuscript. They ask him what it's about, and he says, 'It's about a one-legged captain who's had his leg bitten off by a whale.' It wouldn't have sounded that promising. If a man cares intensely enough about tiddlywinks, his book about tiddlywinks will be a great novel.”
“In Jewish and Islamic mythology God provided us with a garden but did not, indeed could not, do the gardening for us. It was only a garden because we could respond to ti, because we could be responsible for it.”
“Our salvation is in striving to achieve what we know we'll never achieve.”
“Great ideas, ideas that meaningfully reflect something of the world's ancient tradition of wisdom, have the power to bind people together and to bring unity under a goal and a vision that are stronger and deeper than all personal, short-term gain.”
“Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior's world.”
“Because of the extraordinary vastness of perception, you have possibilities of communicating with the depth of the world—the world of sight, the world of sound—the greater world.”
“What if cultivating your own garden were the best way to help the world? What if your little backyard could, with the proper care, grow enough vegetable and fruits to feed a million people? What if your gardening inspired a thousand of your neighbors to do the same?”
“People can accomplish anything if they want it badly enough… reality can become unreal. Or unreality can enter the realm of the real. If we desire it that strongly. Deep in our heart. But that doesn’t mean that we are free. It might demonstrate quite the opposite.”
“You can imprison a person, but not an idea. You can exile a person, but not an idea. You can kill a person, but not an idea.”
“We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.”
“It seemed to me that the wisdom of the ancients could not have simply vanished. Nothing simply vanishes... this energy must be going somewhere. That was when I realized that there must be other places, other worlds. And so I set myself to find them.”
“Life is not only full of individual moments of opportunity, but is itself a window of opportunity that flashes into existence just once and is there for the taking.”
“WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care? [this can ] explain loyalty and how to create enough momentum to turn an idea into a social movement.”
“Essentially the same problem arises whether it is in our relationships to other human beings, to animals, or to the planet—and the solution is also the same: cultivating a much broader awareness of the chains of causality that link us to other, and cultivating the feelings of closeness that can inspire us to act.”
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