For the past few months for work I’ve been reading the Bo Sacks newsletters on marketing and publishing issues. Here’s a sample of one of Bo Sack's pieces.
He posts a plethora of good quotes that apply to writers and thinking. Here are my many favorites so far:
Living a Life
"My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger." Aldous Huxley
"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." Isaac Asimov
"If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe." Lord Salisbury
Thinking Better
"The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions." Claude Levi-Strauss
"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." Henry David Thoreau
"Anyone can negatively criticize – it is the cheapest of all comment because it requires not a modicum of the effort that suggestion requires." Chuck Jones
"The golden age is before us, not behind us." William Shakespeare
"I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts." John Locke
"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions." Leonardo da Vinci
An interviewer once asked Ursula K. Le Guin advice for writers, and she replied: "I am going to be rather hard-nosed and say that if you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you're writing. And if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn't flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work."
The final one is a quote from James Taylor on a recent Oprah’s Master Class episode: “Those days the amount of time to consider, experiment without distraction was a lot longer. It’s very easy today to be distracted. You actually have to really defend your time in order to have a long thought.”
Reach
"Fiction is the truth inside the lie." Stephen King
"A good teacher, like a good entertainer first must hold his audience's attention, then he can teach his lesson." John Henrik Clarke
"If you're riding ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it's still there." Old West Proverb
Bearing the Business
"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries." Rene Descartes
("The reading of all good books on any substrate is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries." BoSacks Corollary)
"A rejection is nothing more than a necessary step in the pursuit of success." Bo Bennett
"It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things." Leonardo da Vinci
"You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else." Albert Einstein
"It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be." Isaac Asimov
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." Winston Churchill
"The only good luck many great men ever had was being born with the ability and determination to overcome bad luck." Channing Pollock
"Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith." Steve Jobs
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." Leonardo da Vinci
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