Top 90 Chase Jarvis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The best camera is the one that you have with you.”

— Chase Jarvis

Featured in: Photography Quotes

2. “Allow yourself the freedom to step away from perfection because it is only then that you can find success.”

— Chase Jarvis

3. “The distance between where you are now and the path you think you should be on is probably smaller than you think it is.”

— Chase Jarvis

4. “Art is a subset of creativity.”

— Chase Jarvis

5. “Creativity is the new literacy.”

— Chase Jarvis

6. “Portfolios are everything, promises are nothing. Do the work.”

— Chase Jarvis

7. “It’s really a great asset to be willing to fail and blow it, so to speak, and to be okay with just making stuff, sharing it and getting feedback.”

— Chase Jarvis

8. “What matters is that you start. All you’re deciding to do is to try. Do whatever you can with what you have. It will never feel like the right time. You will never be “ready.” Avoid preparing too much. Start before you are ready. Start with fear. Start with uncertainty. This is one of the biggest secrets of the most creative, happy, successful people: Just start.”

— Chase Jarvis

9. “Rebellion is always a reaction. That means it’s just another form of control – you are controlled by the thing you are rebelling against. It’s not a choice; it’s a trap.”

— Chase Jarvis

10. “Turning an idea in your head into a tangible reality is one of life’s great satisfactions, whether the end result is a story, a photograph, a meal, or a business.”

— Chase Jarvis

11. “No, a calling is an intuitive hint, a tug we experience when we’re doing something that feels right: This is awesome! I’m going to keep doing this and see where it takes me.”

— Chase Jarvis

12. “Your goal should always be to become the best you, not a pretty good – or even damn good – version of somebody else.”

— Chase Jarvis

13. “Batching similar tasks makes everything more manageable and less daunting. You might set aside a specific time each day for processing emails and one for making phone calls rather than allow these activities to proliferate throughout your day, stealing precious time from work that requires sustained concentration.”

— Chase Jarvis

14. “The new obstacle is figuring out which dream to pursue and then cultivating and applying the necessary energy to engage in that pursuit. The internet provides access to all the world’s libraries, but it also provides access to World of Warcraft – limitless knowledge but also limitless distraction.”

— Chase Jarvis

15. “President Dwight D. Eisenhower often said that what is important is rarely urgent and what is urgent is rarely important.”

— Chase Jarvis

16. “The gear you can’t afford is not the barrier keeping you from success. Gear has very little to do with photography.”

— Chase Jarvis

17. “My experience says that if you put out a lot of personal work that’s good, it tends to attract high dollar commercial work. But to be clear – I don’t create art to get high dollar projects, I do high dollar projects so I can create more art.”

— Chase Jarvis

18. “I don’t create art to get high dollar projects, I do high dollar projects so I can create more art.”

— Chase Jarvis

19. “Overcoming fear and conceiving this ‘art of more’ should be a fundamental practice in what it is that you do and make.”

— Chase Jarvis

20. “The things that made you weird as a kid make you great today. – JAMES VICTORE.”

— Chase Jarvis

21. “We’ve been trained to avoid creative obstacles rather than risk trying to surmount them.”

— Chase Jarvis

22. “This is one of the biggest secrets of the most creative, happy, successful people: Just start.”

— Chase Jarvis

23. “You can love your family. You can trust your friends. You can listen to their encouragement. You can hear their concerns. But in the end, you must decide what works for you. Your life is not a democracy.”

— Chase Jarvis

24. “Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There’s no other route to success. – PABLO PICASSO.”

— Chase Jarvis

25. “Always aim to reduce the friction involved in starting.”

— Chase Jarvis

26. “A fresh idea will always be more appealing than the grind of a project that’s already under way. The insidious thing about a new idea is that it feels productive to stop what we’re doing and tackle that instead. After all, we’re creative – we have to act when inspiration strikes, don’t we? The discipline lies in getting the new idea down onto paper and then going back to finish what you originally started.”

— Chase Jarvis

27. “Creators create. Action is identity. You become what you do. You don’t need permission from anybody to call yourself a writer, entrepreneur, or musician. You just need to write, build a business, or make music. You’ve got to do the verb to be the noun.”

— Chase Jarvis

28. “Put bluntly, too many of us spend years, even decades, in pursuit of someone else’s plan for our one precious life.”

— Chase Jarvis

29. “It’s never very clear what you’re supposed to do instead – only that pursuing creativity is lofty, selfish, or even naive.”

— Chase Jarvis

30. “When it comes to creativity, no effort is ever wasted. Ever. Every unfinished manuscript, sunk business, crumpled charcoal drawing, or abandoned musical instrument represents another step forward. Once you understand that your entire creative journey – every clueless mistake, every stinging failure – is an essential part of your path, you will see that there is nothing to lose by taking the next step, no matter where it leads.”

— Chase Jarvis

31. “The problem is that the human brain evolved to keep us safe, not happy – it will resist your efforts to walk your own path because creativity challenges certainty.”

— Chase Jarvis

32. “There’s a reason it’s so hard to follow our calling. The whisper of intuition telling us what we’re meant to do and how we’re meant to live comes from within, but it leads away into the unknown. Once I finally started listening to the call, I found myself on a new path. Not the path designed by my career counselor, encouraged by my parents, or suggested by society. My own.”

— Chase Jarvis

33. “That’s why we call it work,” he said. “We’re not here to make sure things already rolling downhill keep rolling.”

— Chase Jarvis

34. “No one is coming to save you. Experts are valuable when you’re learning new skills, but neither experts nor institutions are going to nurture you, guide you, or make your creative dream a reality. You’re on your own path. It’s all up to you. This isn’t a bad thing, either. Your creativity gives you the capacity to design the life you want.”

— Chase Jarvis

35. “The author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn once said that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Choose wisely.”

— Chase Jarvis

36. “Stop glamorizing being busy. A hamster on a wheel is busy – where does it get him? I had grander ambitions. I resolved to stop doing whatever came up, whatever highly visible activity created a false aura of productivity and glamour, and instead to focus on being effective. That shift made all the difference.”

— Chase Jarvis

37. “Listening for the call is easy, but only if you know what you’re trying to hear. Is it the murmur of the crowd – your parents, your peers, the tired cultural narrative as a whole? No. It’s that quiet voice inside. Your intuition, your heart. You know the difference.”

— Chase Jarvis

38. “Your point of view is the highest value you can bring. Once you can create work with a distinctive and recognizable personal style over and over again, the world will unlock itself for you. Even if your work is not recognized, you will have unlocked something precious in yourself.”

— Chase Jarvis

39. “You’ve heard poets talk about, poems flowing out of their bodies; painters, they get on a roll. You all have seen the musician, when they are in that state, the guitar, the piano, whatever instrument just becomes part of their body, their ego is completely gone and it is just their connection to the art, their connection to the emotions they are trying to share with the audience- that is pure flow.”

— Chase Jarvis

40. “Your life has two big arcs. The first is about acquisition; acquiring knowledge about yourself and the world – figuring out how to meet your own needs. What am I going to do to make a living? Will I get married? Buy a house? Have kids? The second arc is about contribution. You start thinking about how you can serve others and make a lasting impression on the world. We take, and then we give.”

— Chase Jarvis

41. “Have some empathy. Acknowledge that it’s scary to watch someone you care about change in significant ways. It’s even worse to watch the person you love go where you’ve always been afraid to go yourself. It’s understandable that other people want you to be safe, but that doesn’t mean you should let them deter you from pursuing your dream.”

— Chase Jarvis

42. “The frustration, boredom, or resentment you might feel now is just your intuition’s way of telling you that there’s a turn up ahead.”

— Chase Jarvis

43. “Little did I know at the time that I was developing a rare but powerful tool: quitting stuff I wasn’t meant to do. This is a tool you must wield to create the life you want.”

— Chase Jarvis

44. “My answer to her was simple: Begin. Rekindle your creative craft for a few moments every day. Don’t worry about the rest right now; simply sit down and make something.”

— Chase Jarvis

45. “It’s in the lulls between flow states when we start noticing all the shiny distractions. If we don’t develop the discipline of writing those unrelated ideas down and then ignoring them as we continue our work, we will never find our way back into the flow state. We won’t finish anything, either.”

— Chase Jarvis

46. “Hedging your bets frees you up to play.”

— Chase Jarvis

47. “Life is messy, and without creativity, it’s incomplete. Creativity is not a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have. Think of it as putting your own oxygen mask on before helping others in your row. If creativity keeps getting bumped, it’s flawed prioritization.”

— Chase Jarvis

48. “So at the beginning, go gently. If you’re just getting started with your creative practice, start small.”

— Chase Jarvis

49. “For Starters, the excitement about the next idea masks the reality: they are abandoning their current idea.”

— Chase Jarvis

50. “Imagine what you want to create – without limitation. Design a strategy to make your dream a new reality. Execute your strategy and smash through obstacles. Amplify your vision to create the impact you seek.”

— Chase Jarvis