This is a collection of words of wisdom: quotes, adages and proverbs. The sentiments expressed are ones that give me food for thought – in this context, particularly about my creative work.
There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
~ Ansel Adams
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
~ Scott Adams
We all live under the same sky, but we don’t see the same horizon.
~ Konrad Adenauer
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
~ Maya Angelou, American poet
If you are on a road to nowhere, find another road.
~ Ashanti proverb
If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.
~ Milton Berle, American comedian and actor
Art and science have their meeting point in method.
~ Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton
A day without laughter is a day wasted.
~ Charlie Chaplin
I dreamed a thousand new paths. I woke and walked my old one.
~ Chinese proverb
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
~ Annie Dillard
It’s here, art’s everywhere. It’s how you use your eyes.
~ Ken Done, artist
If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.
~ Lilian Glaze, my Mum
It’s actually an adage but she often said this to me.
The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.
~ Dee Hock, Founder and former CEO of the VISA credit card company
Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
~ James Joyce
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
~ John Lennon
And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
~ Abraham Lincoln
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
~ Friedrich Nietzche
You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’
~ George Bernard Shaw
By small actions
Great things are accomplished.
~ Lao Tse
What you need to know about the past is that no matter what has happened, it has all worked together to bring you to this very moment. And this is the moment you can choose to make everything new. Right now.
~ Source Unknown
There is a fine line between challenge and burden. The most important thing to remember is that when it stops being fun stop doing it.
~ Spottydog, on his Project Management Web Site
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
~ Virginia Woolf
We will not know unless we begin.
~ Peter Nivio Zarlenga, Founder of Blockbuster Videos