Art Of Choosing Quotes & Sayings

It has been said that the world of Proust was a world without a god. If that is true, it is not because God is
never spoken of, but because the ambition of this world is to be absolute perfection and to give to eternity
the aspect of man. Time Regained, at least in its aspirations, is eternity without God. Proust's work, in this
regard, appears to be one of the most ambitious and most significant of man's enterprises against his
mortal condition. He has demonstrated that the art of the novel can reconstruct creation itself, in the form
that it is imposed on us and in the form in which we reject it. In one of its aspects, at least, this art consists
in choosing the creature in preference to his creator. But still more profoundly, it is allied
to the beauty of the world or of its inhabitants against the powers of death and oblivion. It is in this way
that his rebellion is creative — Albert Camus

The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush. Lucky me that I should be permitted the luxury of choosing to find the intimacy inherent in this work that is thrust upon so many women. Lucky me. — Michael Chabon

The Art of a Relationship Living in a city is an art, not a science. Choosing to live in a city is choosing to enter into a relationship with it. And, like any human relationship, the relationship you have with your city is one that requires nurturing, constant practice and work. — The School Of Life

The art is more important than the artist. The work is more important than the person who does it. You must be prepared to sacrifice all the you could possibly have, be, or do; you must be willing to go all the way for your art. If it is a question between choosing between your life and a work of art
any work of art
your decision is made for you. — Lloyd Alexander

I'd rather run a gutsy race, pushing all the way and lose, than run a conservative race only for a win. — Alberto Salazar

And now there's this. A talent show. Silly and nonsensical. Stupid and fun. Together. Laughing. Being part of the human race. Knowing about the horrors that have happened and will happen but choosing to live anyway. Maybe there's an art to being human. — Susan Ee

Balancing hopes, desires and an appreciating of the possibilities with a clear-eyed assessment of the limitations: that is the art of choosing. — Sheena Iyengar

Could it be that God was an extra-terrestrial? What do we mean when we say that heaven is in the clouds? From Jesus Christ to Elvis Presley, every culture tells us of high-flying bird men who zoom around the world creating magnificent works of art and choosing willing followers to share in the eternal glory from beyond the stars. Can all these related phenomena merely be dismissed as coincidence? — Erich Von Daniken

William James, the father of research psychology in the United States, said "The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook." Knowing what to overlook is one way that older adults are typically wiser than young adults. With age comes what is known as a positivity effect. We become more interested in positive information, and our brains react less strongly to what negative information we do encounter. We disengage with interpersonal conflict, choosing to let it be, especially when those in our network are involved. — Meg Jay

I grew up watching my father make plates that featured penises as centerpieces. Pink, proud, and stiff, encircled by cerulean Greek key, Dad's creations made me feel scared and small. I saw a private part of the man I could not measure up to. At six years old, I lived in a world shaded by his ceramic glazes. There was love and color, but anger, too, in the way he kneaded his clay, palms pounding the rich, wet earth into shapes of his choosing. — Royal Young

In a variation on James's recipe for interesting experience
the familiar leavened by the novel
Hobbs's "art of choosing difficulties" requires selecting projects that are "just manageable." If an activity is too easy, you lose focus and get bored. If it's too hard, you become anxious, overwhelmed, and unable to concentrate. Tellingly, one group is distinguished by its zeal for the kind of work that requires you to give it all you've got: high achievers particularly relish taking on risky projects that have only a 50/50 chance of success. — Winifred Gallagher

I was on the sideline with a knee injury and when I came back, I wanted to play at the best level I could. And that's the case for a lot of players, they want the chance to play against the best competition. — Claudio Reyna

Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts. — Madame De Stael

The art of living deliberately is the art of examining this vast storehouse of beliefs, dropping the out-moded ones, consciously choosing those that serve your goals, and carefully crafting new ones in greatest alignment with your desires. — Sir Richard Bishop

Oh, I'm a pretty bad poet. This has been corroborated by others. — Amity Gaige

Choosing to be an artist . . . is choosing to mine deep caverns. It's like getting lost in the darkness and spending the rest of your life trying to find your way. — Michele Zackheim

For godhood and the hope for mankind, and within each of us is the original sin of laziness, the ever-present force of entropy pushing us back to childhood, to the womb and to the swamps from which we have evolved. — M. Scott Peck

In almost every part of life, the important moments are not the ones you'd think are the important ones. The really important moments are before the "big" moments. When you're writing, the moment you sit down at the keyboard isn't the magic moment; the magic moments are when you decide to see and hear and remember and taste everything in the whole world, choosing to believe that art and creativity are all around you, unfolding and beckoning you. And running is about sleep, water, getting a babysitter, not having that last glass or two of wine. By the time you've laced up your shoes and you're moving your feet, most of the hard choices have been made. — Shauna Niequist

The principle of painting is also to make a choice. "Even genius," writes Delacroix, ruminating on his art,
"is only the gift of generalizing and choosing." The painter isolates his subject, which is the first way of
unifying it. Landscapes flee, vanish from the memory, or destroy one another. That is why the landscape
painter or the painter of still life isolates in space and time things that normally change with the light, get
lost in an infinite perspective, or disappear under the impact of other values. The first thing that a
landscape painter does is to square off his canvas. He eliminates as much as he includes. — Albert Camus

Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art; the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing. — Aldo Leopold

Tobias wasn't entirely sure what happened next. All of a sudden everyone was in motion, and Tobias hit the carpet behind the couch face down with one arm wrenched behind his back. "Get the light, Phan! Light!" Noah barked, planting a knee in Tobias' back to keep him down. Tobias sighed, fighting the instinct to move; Noah would break his arm. "This really isn't my night," he said. ~ after Tobias sneaks up on Noah & Phan in the dark while they're watching a horror flick — Chris Owen

I had learned volleyball in the Navy, where all the captains and admirals wanted to be spikers, and I found then that a man who can subdue his own desires and master the art of serving others can make himself invaluable. In choosing sides the team captain always chose the good spikers on the first and second choice, but then the spikers would grab his arm and whisper, 'Take Michener.' I was never chosen lower than third, because I was needed. I wasn't good, but I was faithful. — James A. Michener

The art of choosing men is not nearly so difficult as the art of enabling those chosen to attain their full worth. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Conformity no longer leads to comfort. But the good news is that creativity is scarce, and more valuable than ever. So is choosing to do something unpredictable and brave: make art. Being an artist isn't a genetic disposition or a specific talent. It's an attitude we can all adopt. It's a hunger to seize new ground, make connections, and work without a map. If you do those things you're an artist, no matter what it says on your business card. — Seth Godin

If I haven't any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself. — Anne Frank

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. — John Kenneth Galbraith

It had been said that the art of successful marriage lay in choosing the person you could live with rather than the person you couldn't live without. — Elizabeth Palmer

Your life will contribute to a grand and wonderful story no matter what you do. You have been spoken. You are here, existing, choosing, living, shaping the future and carving the past. Your physical matter and your soul exist, not out of necessity, not voluntarily, and not under their own strength. There is absolutely nothing that you or I can do to guarantee that we will continue to exist. You aren't doing anything that makes you be. We aren't the Author. You and I are spoken. We have been called into this art as characters, born into this thread of occurrence tumbling downstream in the long Niagara of loss set in motion by the trouble that faced our first father and first mother. We will contribute to this narrative. But how? — N.D. Wilson

We're not choosing the art, the art is choosing us. The pieces are choosing the walls where they hang. — Massimo Bottura

If I'm not comfortable, I'm not happy. When I go to the White House, I wear my jeans. — Bobbi Brown

Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus. — Stephen Shore