“Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm… it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.”

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.

The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.

It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.

We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

One of the first signs of a Spirit-filled life is enthusiasm!

Opposition always inflames the enthusiast, never converts him.

I’m enthusiastic and ambitious, and I work hard.

There is nothing more contagious on this planet than enthusiasm.

How do you go from where you are to where you wanna be? And I think you have to have an enthusiasm for life. You have to have a dream, a goal. And you have to be willing to work for it.

Cash can buy, but it takes enthusiasm to sell.

Enthusiasm for a cause sometimes warps judgment.

Today is life-the only life you are sure of. Make the most of today. Get interested in something. Shake yourself awake. Develop a hobby. Let the winds of enthusiasm sweep through you. Live today with gusto.