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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert Grudin
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: March 11
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Soul
Answer
Distant
Really
Asked
Missed
Would
Danger
Necessity
Life
Answers
Excitement
Unclouded
Days
Golden
Wistful
Future
Stress
Primal
Dream
Souls
Suspect
Past
Inner
Suspects

More quotes by Robert Grudin

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The fundamental motive of true teaching is the love that seeks and studies and performs.
Robert Grudin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Plans made swiftly and intuitively are likely to have flaws. Plans made carefully and comprehensively are sure to.
Robert Grudin
Image
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
Image
The future is like the daytime moon, a diffident but faithful companion, so elegant as to be almost invisible, an inconspicuous marvel.
Robert Grudin
Image
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
Image
Psychologically time is seldom homogenous but rather is as full of shapes as space.
Robert Grudin
Image
All great experience has a guarded entrance and a windowless facade.
Robert Grudin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Those who labor for bread or money alone are condemned to their reward.
Robert Grudin
Image
Excellence of mind itself, rightly conceived, is expertise in beauty creativity is wise love.
Robert Grudin
Image
True teachers not only impart knowledge and method but awaken the love of learning by their own reflected love.
Robert Grudin
Image
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
Image
The reason so many promises are not kept is the same as the reason they are made in the first place.
Robert Grudin