Sara Blakely Quotes

I am tapping into a place in you that is unexplored, and very dangerous, but I think essential to the creative life of an artist.

It's really helpful to have somebody to bounce off of and that will say, 'Yeah, that's a horrible idea. You shouldn't do it.'

This happens to me: I have this great idea and then I make the mistake of telling someone else.

To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.

Lovers need to know how to lose themselves and then how to find themselves again.

Life is too short not to say how you feel to the people you love.

Sometimes we even have to risk making fools of ourselves.

But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

Men that look no further than their outsides, think health an appurtenance unto life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick; but I that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that fabric hangs, do wonder that we are not always so; and considering the thousand doors that lead to death, do thank my God that we can die but once.

I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.

I was very vulnerable to criticism for many years. I could read a bad review and remember it my whole life.

Every time a horse let you up onto its back, it’s giving you its life. Every time.

As long as I have you there is just one other thing I'll always need - tremendous self control.

Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.

Reading one's own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet's tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain.

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude

People have been telling me I'm a failure and that I'm doing it all wrong for 20 years now. Never trust anybody when they tell you how your story goes. You know your story. You write your own story.

In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.

I was amplifying the negative at the expense of the positive, not to serve any useful function, not to make my writing better, but to destroy it. The lizard brain, so attuned to people laughing behind our backs, was on high alert for this sort of criticism and would do anything it could to stop me from writing again. I haven't sought out and read a review or a tweet since.

Even if you’ve taken off every stitch of clothing, you still have your secrets, your history, your true name. It’s hard to be really naked. You have to work hard at it. Just getting into a bath isn’t being naked, not really. It’s just showing skin.

In our own woundedness, we can become sources of life for others.

The simple truth is that being a creative artist takes courage; it’s not a job for the faint of heart. It takes courage each and every time you put a book or poem or painting before the public, because it is, in fact, enormously revealing.

Love, the beauty of it, the joy of it and yes, even the pain of it, is the most incredible gift to give and to receive as a human being. And we deserve to experience love fully, equally, without shame and without compromise.

The invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked. If it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that.

... life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it's out. Forever.