Quotes by Robert Grudin - Page 1

Happiness may well consist primarily of an attitude toward time.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Attitude
Inspirational Birthday
May
Wells
Copy Quote
All great experience has a guarded entrance and a windowless facade.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Entrances
Great Experiences
Mystery
Copy Quote
Those who labor for bread or money alone are condemned to their reward.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Work
Bread
Rewards
Copy Quote
Psychologically time is seldom homogenous but rather is as full of shapes as space.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Space
Time
Shapes
Copy Quote
The goal of discoverers is not to outdistance their peers, but to transcend themselves.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Goal
Peers
Copy Quote
The fundamental motive of true teaching is the love that seeks and studies and performs.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Love
Fundamentals
Teaching
Copy Quote
Excellence of mind itself, rightly conceived, is expertise in beauty; creativity is wise love.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Love
Wise
Creativity
Copy Quote
The reason so many promises are not kept is the same as the reason they are made in the first place.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Firsts
Promise
Reason
Copy Quote
We pamper the present like a spoiled child, obeying its superficial demands but ignoring its real needs.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Time
Children
Real
Copy Quote
True teachers not only impart knowledge and method but awaken the love of learning by their own reflected love.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Love
Learning
Teacher
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Generosity
Giving
Purpose
Copy Quote
Plans made swiftly and intuitively are likely to have flaws. Plans made carefully and comprehensively are sure to.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Flaws
Made
Planning
Copy Quote
The future is like the daytime moon, a diffident but faithful companion, so elegant as to be almost invisible, an inconspicuous marvel.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Faith
Time
Memories
Copy Quote
Written truth is four-dimensional. If we consult it at the wrong time, or read it at the wrong place, it is as empty and shapeless as a dress on a hook.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Time
Truth
Dresses
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Freedom
Character
Creativity
Copy Quote
The mind which can totally and inanely forget its work and obligations is often also the mind which can, at the proper time, give them the fullest attention.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Attention
Giving
Mind
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Time
Details
Gauges
Copy Quote
The happy individual is able to renew daily and with full consciousness all the basic expressions of human identity: work, love, communication, play, and rest.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Life
Communication
Expression
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Future
Time
Waiting
Copy Quote
Every home should have a room, or at least a nook with two chairs, where it is a sin punishable by immediate expulsion to speak of money, business, politics or the state of one's teeth.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Home
Should Have
Two
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Blue
Fall
Pain
Copy Quote
Creativity is dangerous. We cannot open ourselves to new insights without endangering the security of our prior assumptions. We cannot propose new ideas without risking disapproval and rejection.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Creativity
Ideas
Rejection
Copy Quote
We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Attitude
Lying
Struggle
Copy Quote
Truth is rhythmical: if it implies stasis, it is platitude. Truth is syncopated: if it supplies all the terms, there is one term too many. Truth is barbed: if it comforts, it lies. Truth is an armed dancer.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Truth
Lying
Reality
Copy Quote
Like students of art who walk around a great statue, seeing parts and aspects of it from each position, but never the whole, we must walk mentally around time, using a variety of approaches, a pandemonium of metaphor.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Art
Time
Students
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Beauty
Beautiful
Ideas
Simple
Copy Quote
We commonly think of freedom as the ability to define alternatives and choose between them. The creative mind exceeds this liberty in being able to redefine itself and reality at large, generating whole new sets of alternatives.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Freedom
Creativity
Reality
Copy Quote
We are wistful about the golden days of the past and dream of a distant future unclouded by necessity. But I suspect that if our inner souls were asked what in life they really missed, the answer would be primal danger and stress.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Dream
Past
Stress
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Imagination
Challenges
Self
Copy Quote
Individuals we consider happy commonly seem complete in the present and we see them constantly in their wholeness: attentive, cheerful, open rather than closed to events, integral in the moment rather than distended across time by regret or anxiety.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Anxiety
Cheerful
Regret
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Creativity
Drama
Simple
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Future
People
Vision
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Half
Long
Order
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Art
Creativity
Inspiration
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Dinner
Epic
Tragedy
Copy Quote
That morning I experienced vividly, if almost subliminally, the reality of change itself: how it fools our sentinels and undermines our defenses, how careful we are to look for it in the wrong places, how it does not reveal itself until it is beyond redress, how vainly we search for it around us and find too late that is has occurred within us.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Change
Life
Morning
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Jobs
Love
Thinking
Copy Quote
Free men and women... can think across time, viewing their own lives, inclusive of past, present, and future, as architectural wholes, static in mental space. They can therefore see, as others cannot, the cracks and buttresses of repeated action, the points of stress, the established framework. They are not perfect; but they are less imperfect than we by a full dimension of being.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Life
Future
Stress
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Life
Drawing
Self
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Moving
Powerful
Winning
Copy Quote
If the estimated age of the cosmos were shortened to seventy-two years, a human life would take about ten seconds. But look at time the other way. Each day is a minor eternity of over 86,000 seconds. During each second, the number of distinct molecular functions going on within the human body is comparable to the number of seconds in the estimated age of the cosmos. A few seconds are long enough for a revolutionary idea, a startling communication, a baby's conception, a wounding insult, a sudden death. Depending on how we think of them, our lives can be infinitely long or infinitely short.
Robert Grudin / Writer
Communication
Baby
Thinking
Copy Quote

Related Writer Authors

Voltaire
Writer
Sunday, Nov 21, 1694
Saturday, May 30, 1778
Oscar Wilde
Writer
Monday, Oct 16, 1854
Friday, Nov 30, 1900
Zoltan Istvan
Writer
Zoe Valdes
Writer
Saturday, May 02, 1959
Zlata Filipović
Writer
Wednesday, Dec 03, 1980
Zitkala-Sa
Writer
Tuesday, Feb 22, 1876
Wednesday, Jan 26, 1938
Ziauddin Sardar
Writer
Wednesday, Oct 31, 1951
Zelig Pliskin
Writer
Zan Perrion
Writer
Saturday, Jul 02, 1966
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Writer
Yusuf Idris
Writer
Thursday, May 19, 1927
Thursday, Aug 01, 1991
Young-Ha Kim
Writer
Monday, Nov 11, 1968
Yoshiki Nakamura
Writer
Tuesday, Jun 17, 1969
Yoko Ogawa
Writer
Friday, Mar 30, 1962
Yiyun Li
Writer
Saturday, Nov 04, 1972

View All Writer Quotes

Top Authors

Marcus Aurelius
Roman Emperor
Saturday, Apr 26, 0121
Friday, Mar 17, 0180
Vince Lombardi
Football Player
Wednesday, Jun 11, 1913
Thursday, Sep 03, 1970
Billy Graham
Evangelist
Thursday, Nov 07, 1918
Aristotle
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essayist
Wednesday, May 25, 1803
Thursday, Apr 27, 1882
Oscar Wilde
Writer
Monday, Oct 16, 1854
Friday, Nov 30, 1900
Soren Kierkegaard
Philosopher
Wednesday, May 05, 1813
Sunday, Nov 11, 1855
Dr. Seuss
Writer
Wednesday, Mar 02, 1904
Tuesday, Sep 24, 1991
Mahatma Gandhi
Civil Rights Leader
Saturday, Oct 02, 1869
Friday, Jan 30, 1948
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Civil Rights Activist
Tuesday, Jan 15, 1929
Thursday, Apr 04, 1968
Henry David Thoreau
Author
Saturday, Jul 12, 1817
Tuesday, May 06, 1862
Ronald Reagan
40Th US President
Monday, Feb 06, 1911
Saturday, Jun 05, 2004
Walt Disney
Animator
Thursday, Dec 05, 1901
Thursday, Dec 15, 1966
Peter Drucker
Author
Friday, Nov 19, 1909
Friday, Nov 11, 2005
Wayne Dyer
Author
Friday, May 10, 1940
Saturday, Aug 29, 2015

View All Authors

Robert Grudin Quotes - Page 1

App & Tools

Related Writer Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

App & Tools

Related Writer Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page