— ELIZABETH GILBERT, Big Magic, 2015

"If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else."

— Toni Morrison

" Success, to me, is helping one person, or many people, counter the isolation and pseudo connectivity of our lives by boosting their ability to connect to themselves and to others."

— Esther Perel

"I don’t think about being great. My only consideration is a personal involvement in maintaining the adventure of making art. Accepting history, even mind, and continuing. With hopes that I will discover outside of the familiar a light that can shine in someone’s life that can glow with new insights to enrich the new that has been old for centuries. Vision must be kept fresh and nourished."

— ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, Journal do Brasil, 1994

" I don’t believe our world needs more positivity. I believe our world needs minds that are equipped to be with the complexity of life. Minds that can hold nuance and polarity. Minds that can stay grounded, centered, and open to a full range of what it means to be human."

— Cory Muscara

“Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.”

— GLENNON DOYLE, Untamed, 2020

“Why do we have to listen to our hearts?” the boy asked, when they had made camp that day.
“Because, wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure.”
“But my heart is agitated,” the boy said. “It has its dreams, it gets emotional…It asks things of me, and it keeps me from sleeping many nights…”
“Well, that’s good. Your heart is alive. Keep listening to what it has to say.”

— PAULO COELHO, The Alchemist, 1988

“Either you have courage, or you don’t in life. If you have courage, you receive a few bumps here and there, but on the whole, it’s more interesting.”

— Françoise Gilot

“I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.”

— Brené Brown

“Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn’t matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege. Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us. Make space for all these paradoxes to be equally true inside your soul, and I promise—you can make anything. So please calm down now and get back to work, okay?”

— ELIZABETH GILBERT, Big Magic, 2015

"It’s enough to be alive
To see the sea and sky 
And watch the changes
To eat talk joke and create love
Feel the ground sun yourself
And not have to be somebody."

— BERNARD GUNTHER, 1968 

"I’m not terribly interested in beauty. What touches me is someone who understands herself."

— Vivienne Westwood

“I learned that there is a type of pain in life that I want to feel. It’s the inevitable, excruciating, necessary pain of losing beautiful things: trust, dreams, health, animals, relationships, people. This kind of pain is the price of love, the cost of living a brave, openhearted life—and I’ll pay it.”

— GLENNON DOYLE, Untamed, 2020

"In the age of information overload, the ultimate luxury is meaning and context."

— Louis Rossetto 

“It was just very interesting to me that certain types of women inspire people’s imagination, and all of them were very difficult women.” 

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.”

— LOUISE ERDRICH, The Painted Drum, 2005

"It is not your job to convert people to your way of thinking. It is your job to speak your truth so that others may find theirs."

— holly whitaker 

“You either walk inside your story and own it, or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.”

— Brené Brown

“Pure creativity is magnificent expressly because it is the opposite of everything else in life that’s essential or inescapable (food, shelter, medicine, rule of law, social order, community and familial responsibility, sickness, loss, death, taxes, etc.). Pure creativity is something better than a necessity; it’s a gift. It’s the frosting. Our creativity is a wild and unexpected bonus from the universe.”

— ELIZABETH GILBERT, Big Magic, 2015

"Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled—to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—that the light is everything."

— MARY OLIVER, The House of Light, 1990

“Recognizing that people's reactions don't belong to you is the only sane way to create. If people enjoy what you've created, terrific. If people ignore what you've created, too bad. If people misunderstand what you've created, don't sweat it. And what if people absolutely hate what you've created? What if people attack you with savage vitriol, and insult your intelligence, and malign your motives, and drag your good name through the mud? Just smile sweetly and suggest - as politely as you possibly can - that they go make their own fucking art.”