Quotes About Inspiration

A man should cause an impression," she said. "He should leave you with something to think about. Without that, there's no magic.

Luz's manner of speaking made it clear that she had no idea what she might say next. It wasn't that she made things up, strictly speaking--only that facts were merely a point of departure for her.

You don't sound like a scientist; you sound like a poet." Rey smiled. "Can I be both?" "But you'd rather be a poet." "Who wouldn't?" he said.

But I also think I have never seen it in a book—the thing I needed to read, just then, and this feeling makes me agitated and restless: it makes me want to write the book where someone could find the thing I needed to read in the last seven or eight years.

Writing is nothing if not solving problems you've created for yourself. There are no outside solutions or methods.

You don't sound like a scientist, you sound like a poet." Rey smiled, "Can I be both?" But you'd rather be a poet." Who wouldn't?" he said.

Technology like art is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.

It isn't how you die. It's what you live for.

That's the biggest part of doing comics: You have to create stuff that makes you want to get out of bed every morning and get to work.

As Pablo Picasso (no slouch at theft himself) put it, "Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.

Studies show that even a brief connection with a role model can vastly increase unconscious motivation.

Studies show that even a brief connection with a role model can vastly increase unconscious motivation. For example, being told that you share a birthday with a mathematician can improve the amount of effort you're willing to put into difficult math tasks by 62 percent.

If you were to visit a dozen talent hotbeds tomorrow, you would be struck by how much time the learners spend observing top performers.

Master teachers and coaches don't stand in front; they stand alongside the individuals they're helping. They don't give long speeches; they deliver useful information in small, vivid chunks.

Think of your windshield as an energy source for your brain. Use pictures (the walls of many talent hotbeds are cluttered with photos and posters of their stars) or, better, video. One idea: Bookmark a few YouTube videos, and watch them before you practice, or at night before you go to bed.

What ignited the progress wasn't any innate skill or gene. It was a small, ephemeral, yet powerful idea: a vision of their ideal future selves, a vision that oriented, energized, and accelerated progress, and that originated in the outside world.

High-purpose environments are filled with small, vivid signals designed to create a link between the present moment and a future ideal.

As Albert Einstein said, "One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one's greatest efforts.

Creative skills, on the other hand, are about empowering a group to do the hard work of building something that has never existed before.

In the space of a few generations a city with a population slightly less than that of present-day Stillwater, Oklahoma, produced the greatest outpouring of artistic achievement the world has ever known.

Preview Future Connection:

This group performed well no matter what he did. Nick said it was mostly because of one guy. You can see this guy is causing Nick to get almost infuriated—his negative moves aren't working like they had in the other groups, because this guy could find a way to flip it and engage everyone and get people moving toward the goal.

Make the Leader Occasionally Disappear: Several leaders of successful groups have the habit of leaving the group alone at key moments.

This place is like a greenhouse," Hsieh says. "In some greenhouses, the leader plays the role of the plant that every other plant aspires to. But that's not me. I'm not the plant that everyone aspires to be. My job is to architect the greenhouse.