Edith Schaeffer Quotes

With every project you do, you bring out a part of yourself, and it seems to be quite a good way of expanding a person.

People are easily intimidated when they decorate their home. They think it has to be one way. But there's no one way. It's your way, your style. At the end of the day, you have to live there. It's your cocoon, your nest. You have to be happy in it.

I definitely still like writing one-liners, but I also think that I've changed a lot in that I've allowed myself freedom to grow.

It's hard no to work, so I find a way to put myself back to work. And I think it's important, in between projects, for me to sit down with who I've just become and allow her to continue to evolve and find a home inside me before I go and become somebody else. But I think I also need to learn to relax and not prepare too much, just enjoy life. I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don't have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.

Every person has contributed to me as a human, but a lot of the characters I do are ones I created.

You improve yourself and light up the corner that you live on. You may not touch a gazillion lives, but you can light up your own space, light up your home.

I'll develop my own image. I'm an original man. A one and only. I just need some help.

Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one's own-be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid.

We have to bring back the individual. Management has smothered the individual.

Do not internalize the industrial model. You are not one of the myriad interchangeable pieces, but a unique human being, and if you've got something to say, say it, and think well of yourself while you're learning to say it better.

Life is creation - self and circumstances, the raw material.

Individuality' is the key to success.

It is important to foster individuality, for only the individual can produce the new ideas.

I will work on myself, since the work on myself is going to be the highest thing I can do for it all, since I understand that as man up-levels his own consciousness, he sees more creative solutions to the problems that he's confronting.

Don't cheat people of their growth. Empower them to solve problems and generate ideas. Watch them grow!

Develop that individuality by working as hard as you can at what you love.

Every man's foremost task is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved.

Our problem is to become acquainted with our own selves, letting our personalities loose upon the world for the sheer adventure of their full development and in the positive hope that they may in their own way lift the level of humanity.

The worst thing you can do is say to yourself, "I want to be just like somebody else." You have to absorb knowledge from someone else, but ultimately you have to find your own voice.

That is my reality. It's that important to nurture and foster my own creativity. There are plenty of birthday parties I haven't been able to go to, weddings I haven't been able to go to because I've been working. Those are things that have not been easy to give up, but at the same time, it is my reality. It's my responsibility.

One thing is certain: the arts keep you alive. They stimulate, encourage, challenge, and, most of all, guarantee a future free from boredom. They allow growth and even demand it in that time of life we call maturity but too often enter it with a childish faith that what we learned in youth is sustenance enough for the years when most men are mentally famished but won't admit it—or when they are apt to curb their hunger with the sops of complacency, security, and the assurance of death.

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people .

Right now in my middle years, I'm getting to enjoy a resurgence of my own creativity, which I'm fully embracing and enjoying.

You are both a work of art and an artist at work.

What Kierkegaard said about love is also true of creativity: every person must start at the beginning.