Top 90 Eric Maisel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A wild person with a calm mind can make anything.”

— Eric Maisel

2. “If, because of anxiety and self-doubt, you procrastinate and only think about working, you’ll feel more exhausted than if you’d created for hours.”

— Eric Maisel

3. “Affirmations are not bound up in rules. An affirmation can be long or short, poetic or plain. If you love a phrase and find that it helps you, that is a valid affirmation.”

— Eric Maisel

4. “The middle way cannot be achieved by dividing two extremes in half.”

— Eric Maisel

5. “To create you must quiet your mind. You need a quiet mind so that ideas will have a chance of connecting.”

— Eric Maisel

6. “Settle into mystery as you would settle into your most comfortable chair. Listen. Have visions. Lose yourself.”

— Eric Maisel

7. “Live intensely and dangerously. The world may not depend on your efforts, but you do.”

— Eric Maisel

8. “Love is the spirit that motivates the artist’s journey. The love may sublime, raw, obsessive, passionate, awful. or thrilling, but whatever its quality, it’s a powerful motive in the artist’s life.”

— Eric Maisel

9. “Dream, but expect nothing. Desire, but expect nothing. Hope, but expect nothing. Release your need to control and gain real control.”

— Eric Maisel

10. “A composition is an arrangement, built out of parts, that aims at seamlessness.”

— Eric Maisel

11. “Deconstruction is great for the intellect, but it hurts the heart terribly.”

— Eric Maisel

12. “The artist at her best – wild, passionate, rebellious, and human – is often too large and truthful a creature for society’s taste. The artist at her most outlandish – profane, eccentric, even a little mad – is at least as disquieting a figure.”

— Eric Maisel

13. “By ‘expecting nothing’ you are not ‘giving up.’ Far from it! You are making a decision to focus on what needs to be done rather than on outcomes.”

— Eric Maisel

14. “Creativity requires introspection, self-examination, and a willingness to take risks. Because of this, artists are perhaps more susceptible to self-doubt and despair than those who do not court the creative muses.”

— Eric Maisel

15. “Chaos is everywhere – and artists, to fashion art and live truthfully, have no choice but to invite this unwanted guest right into the studio.”

— Eric Maisel

16. “Rekindling hope, engaging in inner work, and venturing into the world amount to a complete plan for picking yourself up when you’re down.”

— Eric Maisel

17. “Talent is so loaded a word, so full to the brim with meanings, that an artist might be wise to forget about it altogether and just keep on working.”

— Eric Maisel

18. “Almost nothing beautiful or brilliant happens unless a person has thought about it a lot.”

— Eric Maisel

19. “The artist, who must venture into the studio and risk there, and then venture into the marketplace and risk again, is obliged to learn how her defences work, so that she can drop and raise her guard instantly.”

— Eric Maisel

20. “Ambition is vital, but dangerous: it is a keen motive and a driving force, but over what edge can it drive the artist?”

— Eric Maisel

21. “You can’t plan in advance for everything – every mood swing, every mistake you might make in execution, every shift in your circumstances. But you can keep updating your plan...”

— Eric Maisel

22. “An artist feels vulnerable to begin with; and yet the only answer is to recklessly discard more armour.”

— Eric Maisel

23. “We can carve time out of thin air, or we can fill up even infinite stretches of time with nothingness. These are our choices.”

— Eric Maisel

24. “Life is too short not to create, not to love, and not to lend a helping hand to our brothers and sisters.”

— Eric Maisel

25. “Whatever pain and suffering you’ve experienced in your life has been a blessing at least in this one regard: you now know some true things that you couldn’t have learned any other way.”

— Eric Maisel

26. “The three elements of creativity are thus: loving, knowing, and doing – or heart, mind, and hands – or, as Zen Buddhist teaching has it; great faith, great question, and great courage.”

— Eric Maisel

27. “The artist, busy and unsettled, can find a moment’s peace – and even whole-being rejuvenation – by quietly attuning to a red sky, a gray sky, a black sky, a blue sky.”

— Eric Maisel

28. “The strange, unbeautiful face beautiful in its ugliness; the perfect, beautiful face ugly in its perfection.”

— Eric Maisel

29. “All space is space in which to create.”

— Eric Maisel

30. “I am one powerful self made up of so many selves that sometimes I throw myself a get-acquainted party.”

— Eric Maisel

31. “We have enough experiences in a day to make art for a decade.”

— Eric Maisel

32. “It is the artist’s job to revere beauty without being enchanted by it, to aim for it but also to aim for truth and goodness – just in case they, and not beauty, are the real things of value.”

— Eric Maisel

33. “Remind yourself of the value of detaching from work that’s out of your hands and committing to new work that wants to be born.”

— Eric Maisel

34. “Creativity is part sweat – not just beads of it, but sometimes buckets.”

— Eric Maisel

35. “How can a person brim over with life energy and big plans one moment and feel suicidal the next? She can cycle exactly that way because of the god-bug syndrome.”

— Eric Maisel

36. “No muse shoots darts of insight into the unsuspecting artist.”

— Eric Maisel

37. “The artist can’t paint, sing, or dance without emotion: if he does, he is a machine masquerading as a person.”

— Eric Maisel

38. “While it may feel natural to devote yourself to your creative work and succumb to feelings of separation and alienation, it nevertheless isn’t a terrific idea in terms of your overall happiness and health.”

— Eric Maisel

39. “Who knows how many artists fail because the light that shines through them is defracted in a thousand directions and not concentrated in a single beam?”

— Eric Maisel

40. “A long, deep breath is the equivalent of a full stop and the key to centering.”

— Eric Maisel

41. “The artist’s task is to become a successful eccentric, a strange but wise duck able to venture out of solitary confinement and mingle among society.”

— Eric Maisel

42. “An artist who is too self-centered is liable to exhibit faults he abhors: carelessness, callousness, and even downright cruelty.”

— Eric Maisel

43. “Boredom is the thing that regularly arrives between excitements and episodes of meaning: it is as natural as the tides, and in it an artist can drown.”

— Eric Maisel

44. “Love is the spirit that motivates the artist’s journey.”

— Eric Maisel

45. “People who think a lot are more prone to mania than people who do not think a lot. That intelligent, creative, and thoughtful people are the ones more regularly afflicted by mania is beyond question.”

— Eric Maisel

46. “Creativity is the gift that keeps on giving.”

— Eric Maisel

47. “Art and business may be strange bedfellows, but an artist must make room in her bed for both.”

— Eric Maisel

48. “A creative block is a fear about the future, a guess about the dangers dwelling in the dark computer and the locked studio.”

— Eric Maisel

49. “An ability to choose is a necessity for the artist.”

— Eric Maisel

50. “The artist must reckon with his own character flaws, which do not disappear just because he has been called to be an artist.”

— Eric Maisel