Quotes About Learning

The reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain—the lost lover, the sickly child, the shattered dream. But what is healed, finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, "unutterably alone." More than anything else, attention is an act of connection. I learned this the way I have learned most things—quite

Younger artists are seedlings. Their early work resembles thicket and underbrush, even weeds. The halls of academia, with their preference for lofty intellectual theorems, do little to support the life of the forest floor.

Artists and intellectuals are not he same animal. This causes a great deal of confusion. Our schools teach educate us intellectually but not artistically. We learn to deconstruct art, not construct it.

Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown. CLAUDE BERNARD

It's a luxury to be in the mood to write. It's a blessing but it's not a necessity. Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.

We tend to think of the rational as a higher order, but it is the emotional that makes our lives. One often learns more from ten days of agony than from ten years of contentment. MERLE SHAIN

Remember that in order to recover as an artist, you must be willing to be a bad artist. Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.

Once we are willing to accept that anything worth doing might even be worth doing badly our options widen.

pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention. In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate, and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me ... In the exact now, we are all, always, all right ... Realizing this, I began to notice that each moment was not without its beauty.

When I make this point in teaching, I am met by instant, defensive hostility: "But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano/act/paint/write a decent play?" Yes … the same age you will be if you don't.

Pages tutor us in courage.

Do not fear mistakes," Miles Davis told us. "There are none.

When I make this point in teaching, I am met by instant, defensive hostility: "But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano/act/paint/write a decent play?" Yes . . . the same age you will be if you don't. So let's start.

The artist child must begin by crawling. Baby steps will follow and there will be falls—yecchy first paintings, beginning films that look like unedited home movies, first poems that would shame a greeting card.

QUESTION: Do you know how old I'll be by the time I learn to play the piano? ANSWER: The same age you will be if you don't.

It may be different for others, but pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention. In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right.

In order to do something well, we must first be willing to do it badly.

We ate the lunch with painful politeness and avoided discussing its taste. I made sure not to apologize for it. This was a rule of mine. I don't believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make... Usually one's cooking is better than one thinks it is. And if the food is vile,...then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile- and learn from her mistakes.

Well, all I know is this—nothing you ever learn is really wasted, and will sometime be used.

The more I learned the more I realized how very much one has to know before one is in-the-know at all.

had been a year earlier. Looking back, it had been a year of growth. Paul's personality had enlarged, he'd gained further wisdom, if not salary

And the great lesson embedded in the book is that no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing. This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook—try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!

The more you know, the more you can create. There's no end to imagination in the kitchen.

You don't spring into good cooking naked. You have to have some training. You have to learn how to eat.