#passion

Great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama. And I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft: of knowing what to steal and from whom. Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me. They ride with me during all my days, and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me. I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains, and I pretend the gifts are mine. I steal from the great teachers. And the truly wonderful thing about them is they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it, realizing they had taught me their larcenous skills well. ↗

— Pat Conroy

#passion #teaching #art

every good artist paints what he is ↗

— Jackson Pollock

#humanity #passion #art

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker. ↗

— Thomas Hardy

#competence #creation #creativity #passion #skill-technique

Peace can be found within, no matter the external circumstances. ↗

— Allan Lokos

#compassion #pyschology #self-help #wisdom #art

Great art comes from passion, from a need to expose human spirit in the face of mortality, the small cruelties and heroisms that make up daily life -- that's where great work comes from, and if you enable students in this way to discover those impulses and observations in themselves, those heroisms and cruelties in themselves, you create an atmosphere in which art can emerge. ↗

— Deb Margolis

#creativity #passion #art

What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn't it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, "That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful! ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#writing #art

Pardon all runners, All speechless, alien winds, All mad waters. Pardon their impulses, Their wild attitudes, Their young flights, their reticence. When a message has no clothes on How can it be spoken. ↗

— Thomas Merton

#path #seekers #youth #zen #attitude

Jesus tells us: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ (Mk 12:31). How can we love our neighbor if we can’t or won’t love ourselves, at least a little? When we hold ourselves to unrealistic standards, that perfectionist attitude can’t help but trickle down. It becomes harder to have compassion for others if we have no compassion for ourselves. ↗

— Mary DeTurris Poust

#faith #self-love #attitude

We must quit thinking we know everything, and quit placing "knowledge" over kindness and compassion. ↗

— Bryant McGill

#compassion #humbleness #kindness #knowledge #open-mindedness

The human body is the best work of art. ↗

— Jess C. Scott

#beauty #body #body-image #dancer #desire