Mark Tobey Quotes

To successfully open the door to heightened awareness, we must open it inward.

Learning to cultivate an awareness of the known and unknown within one's being often leads to a healthier and more realistic sense of self.

Become aware of what is in you. Announce it, pronounce it, produce it, and give birth to it.

Self-knowledge is essential not only to writing, but to doing almost anything really well. It allows you to work through from a deep place - from the deep, dark corners of your subconscious mind.

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen.

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

Man has made remarkable strides in conquering outer space, but how futile have been his efforts in conquering inner space- the space in our hearts and minds of men.

When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity.

The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief. Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test in your own awareness and experience. The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation.

I believe in the importance of seeking self-knowledge. The more I know myself, the more I feel empowered.

I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come to me from within.

Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you.

It is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself.

When the mind soars in pursuit of the things conceived in space...it pursues emptiness; but when man dives deep within himself, he experiences the fullness of existence.

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

The moment of recognizing your own lack of talent is a flash of genius.

Self-knowledge is only from moment to moment, and therefore there is a creative happiness from moment to moment.

What is the relationship between awareness and thinking? Awareness is the space in which thoughts exist when that space has become conscious of itself.

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

Everything is a subject; the subject is yourself. It is within yourself that you must look and not around you... The greatest happiness is to reveal it to others, to study oneself, to paint oneself continually in [one's] work.

The search for an equilibrium is essential for the artist, to be as aware of inner space as he is of outer space.

Not until you become a stranger to yourself will you be able to make acquaintance with the Friend.