The extent to which we live from day to day, from week to week, intent on details and oblivious to larger presences, is a gauge of our impoverishment in time. Robert Grudin More Quotes by Robert Grudin More Quotes From Robert Grudin The recalling of beautiful things, whether they are your own experiences or the acheivements of others, is a creative act. Simple ideas can be restated by rote; but profound ideas must be recreated by will and imagination. Robert Grudin simple beautiful beauty The future is like the daytime moon, a diffident but faithful companion, so elegant as to be almost invisible, an inconspicuous marvel. Robert Grudin faith time memories True intimacy is a human constant. People of all types find it equally hard to achieve, equally precious to hold. Age, education, social status, make little difference here; even genius does not presuppose the talent to reveal one's self completely and completely absorb one's self in another personality. Intimacy is to love what concentration is to work: a simultaneous drawing together to attention and release of energy. Robert Grudin drawing self life Happiness may well consist primarily of an attitude toward time. Robert Grudin inspirational-birthday may attitude At pains to define liberty, that most resolute of indefinables, our minds fall back on spatial images; on birds, sailboats, and mountains; the untethered balloon, the blue sky, the nude figure. Robert Grudin pain blue fall In the landscape of time, there are few locations less comfortable than that of one who waits for some person or event to arrive at some unknown moment in the future. Robert Grudin future waiting time The goal of discoverers is not to outdistance their peers, but to transcend themselves. Robert Grudin peers goal Because it is a radical act of freedom, creative achievement is a heroic process that requires, in all its permutations, specific strengths of character. Robert Grudin creativity freedom character The fundamental motive of true teaching is the love that seeks and studies and performs. Robert Grudin teaching fundamentals love What liberates the imagination is the sense that work in its theory and practice holds aesthetic possibilities, that jobs can be elegantly conceived and gracefully done. This sense of beauty unlocks feelings of pleasure and love and breaks down the barrier between worker and work and commit to work not merely the "thinking" consciousness but the full resources of mind. Robert Grudin love jobs thinking Great drama, like the energy implicit in every atom, is eternally around and within us, but liberated only by coincidence, ceremony, creativity, periods reaching completion, pressures reaching the bursting point, and the simple but painful cultivation of awareness. Robert Grudin creativity simple drama Fast drivers can see no further than slow drivers, but they must look further down the road to time their reactions safely. Similarly, people with great projects afoot habitually look further and more clearly into the future than people who are mired in day-to-day concerns. Robert Grudin future vision people The limitation in our ability to perceive broad distinctions in scope can be applied to our moral and temporal responses.... We agonize over a dinner menu, or have engine trouble on the way to work; and for seconds or minutes our cosmos shrinks to a miniscule volume of being, an epic of cheese sauces or tragedy of fanbelts. Robert Grudin dinner epic tragedy You may cure yourself of a depression by forcing yourself to perform, in rapid order and with excruciating concentration, half a dozen or so unpleasant chores, especially if they have long been postponed. This is a kind of homeopathic purgative, a treatment of like with like. Robert Grudin half order long Chess, which exists predominantly in two dimensions, is one of the world's most difficult games. Three-dimensional chess is an invitation to insanity. But human relationships, even of the simplest order, are like a kind of four-dimensional chess, a game whose pieces and positions change subtly and inexorably between moves, whose players stare dumbly while their powerful positions deteriorate into hopeless predicaments and while improbable combinations suddenly become inevitable. To make matters worse, some games are open to any number of players, and all sides are expected to win. Robert Grudin powerful winning moving To be open to inspiration, one must cultivate a leaning for the problematic, a chronic attraction to things that do not totally fit, agree, or make sense. Inspired ideas are less often solutions to old problems than newly discovered or totally reformulated problems - problems 'created' like brilliant works of art. Robert Grudin creativity inspiration art No psychological message is so open to question as that which tells us that we have nothing left to do or to give. Robert Grudin generosity purpose giving The reason so many promises are not kept is the same as the reason they are made in the first place. Robert Grudin reason promise firsts Those who labor for bread or money alone are condemned to their reward. Robert Grudin rewards bread work Such self-transformation is the most difficult and dangerous challenge to the imagination, and it is the most rewarding. Meeting it is only possible for the person whose mind is open to contradictions and well-practiced in free conjecture. Robert Grudin imagination self challenges
