Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
—Howard H. Aiken
Don’t do it. Don’t go to that job you hate. Do something you love today. Ride a roller coaster. Swim in the ocean. Go to the airport and get on the next flight to anywhere just for the fun of it. Maybe stop a spinning globe with your finger and then plan a trip to that very spot; even if it’s in the middle of the ocean you can go by boat. Eat some type of ethnic food you’ve never even heard of. Stop a stranger and ask her to explain her greatest fears and her secret hopes and aspirations in detail and then tell her you care because she is a human being. Sit down on the sidewalk and make pictures with colorful chalk. Close your eyes and try to see the world with your nose—allow smells to be your vision. Catch up on your sleep. Call an old friend you haven’t seen in years. Roll up your pant legs and walk into the sea. See a foreign film. Feed squirrels. Do anything! Something! Because you start a revolution one decision at a time, with each breath you take. Just don’t go back to that miserable place you go every day.
—Matthew Quick in Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock
Many of us have no long-range vision in much of our struggle. We think only of the moment, this time, this place, this circumstance. But think of the ten generations of children that inherit love, and their children, and theirs.… Anyone can count the seeds of an apple. Who can count the apples in a seed?
—Stephen Covey
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
—George Orwell
In forming a bridge between body and mind, dreams may be used as a springboard from which man can leap to new realms of experience lying outside his normal state of consciousness and enlarge his vision not only of himself, but also of the universe in which he lives.
—Ann Faraday
We see achievement as purposeful and monolithic, like the sculpting of a massive tree trunk that has first to be brought from the forest and then shaped by long labor to assert the artist's vision, rather than something crafted from odds and ends, like a patchwork quilt, and lovingly used to warm different nights and bodies.
—Mary Catherine Bateson
Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.
—Annie Dillard
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
—Isaac Bashevis Singer
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
—Honoré de Balzac
Imagination is the eye of the soul.
—Joseph Joubert
In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
The flower in the vase smiles, but no longer laughs.
—Malcolm de Chazal
Vision is the true creative rhythm.
—Robert Delaunay
Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny.
—Georges Braque
In the long history of man, countless empires and nations have come and gone. Those which created no lasting works of art are reduced today to short footnotes in history's catalog. Art is a nation's most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal to ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a Nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish. We in America have not always been kind to the artists and the scholars who are the creators and the keepers of our vision. Somehow, the scientists always seem to get the penthouse, while the arts and the humanities get the basement.
—Lyndon B. Johnson