Audre Lorde Quotes

I mean, what do you think creativity is? Nothing but self-indulgence. And the more self-indulgent it is, the more interesting it becomes. So I think that part of creativity is also falling in love with your own narcissism: accepting it, using it as an asset.

Your desintation is a life of meaning, fulfillment, creativity and joy. A life free of fears, obsessions, compulsions, and addictions, without the insecurities others activates so easily and the torments they create in you. WHen you resist your [life] experiences, you resist the guidance they offer. Anger, resentment jealousy and fear each show you in their own way what you need to change inside yourself in order to reach your destination. Are you listening?

I do know my own mind,' protested Anne. 'The trouble is, my mind changes and then I have to get acquainted with it all over again.

I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense.

I am pretty sick with myself! It seemed a pretty good idea at the time. Around the time I turned 30, I started to feel very creative, more creative than I had been before which is good and I like that.

Out of the house and on my own, I faced the fact I didn't much like who I was. I didn't like my judgmentalism; I didn't like my absolutism. I didn't like my repression of natural empathy, my pinched lack of emotional generosity. How I had been thinking politically had less to do with what was wrong with the world and more to do with what was wrong with me, with my fears and insecurities, failings, weaknesses.

The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

Before someone can change his ideas, he has to open his heart.

I think that there is a tragic misfit at the core of me, and I've just done a lot of work on myself. I love a good self-help book; I've read a ton of them. I love self-help seminars and therapy and all that.

True change takes place in the imagination.

To me that's what Jobs was about. He said at the end of the movie, 'When you realize that the world was created by people no smarter than you, your life will change.' That, to me, is a message for right now and people figuring out what they're going to do with themselves.

You change your life by changing your heart.

It's a very hard thing for all of us to accept ourselves at all the different stages - the horrible side, the wonderful side, the adorable side - and who you are as a grownup. And then to bring what you learned as a child to that grownup: that is the magic of creativity.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

Self-awareness is not self-centeredness, and spirituality is not narcissism. 'Know thyself' is not a narcissistic pursuit.

We should all feel confident in our intelligence. By the way, intelligence to me isn't just being book-smart or having a college degree; it's trusting your gut instincts, being intuitive, thinking outside the box, and sometimes just realizing that things need to change and being smart enough to change it.

People learn the most about themselves by confronting those with whom they deeply disagree..

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law.

Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.

If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.

You get to a point where you get tired of being stupid and selfish and not being honest with yourself.

I'm a victim of my own insides. There was a time when I wanted to know everything. It used to make me very unhappy, all that feeling. I just didn't know what to do with it. But now I've learned to make that feeling work for me.

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

All the work I do is personal, so the good stuff and the bad stuff that you see in there is all good stuff and bad stuff that I have, and part of the journey, for me, has been to embrace these things that I find embarrassing about myself: my stubbornness, my ego, my maudlin-ness - these things that I see myself do, and I go, 'Oh, David, stop that!'