48 Quotes On Attitude

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Enjoy this collection of my favorite quotes on attitude.
“Our life is what our thoughts make it.” ― Marcus Aurelius
“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.” – Buddha
“Life is like a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.” – Ernest Holmes
“The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind.” – Dr Wayne W. Dyer
“Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.” ― Winston S. Churchill
“Attitude is everything.” – Diane von Furstenberg
“Life is 10 percent what you make it and 90 percent how you take it.” ― Irving Berlin
“It’s not what happens to you that determines how far you will go in life; it is how you handle what happens to you.” – Zig Ziglar
“Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.” – Khalil Gibran
“The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.” – William James
“It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect It’s successful outcome.” – William James
“Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it, for that determines our success or failure. The way you thing about a fact may defeat you before you ever do anything about it. You are overcome by the fact because you think you are.” – Norman Vincent Peale
“Attitudes are nothing more than habits of thoughts, and habits can be acquired. An action repeated becomes an attitude realized.” – Paul Myer
“People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.” – John C. Maxwell
“Our attitude towards others determines their attitude towards us.” – Earl Nightingale
“We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.” – Elbert Hubbard
“Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.” – William James
“Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.” – Albert Einstein
“Most of the shadows of life are caused by standing in our own sunshine.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The optimist sees opportunity in every danger; the pessimist sees danger in every opportunity.” Winston Churchill
“I’ve always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.” – Sugar Ray Robinson
“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are right.” – Henry Ford
“Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can.” – Willis Whitney
“They can because they think they can.” – Virgil
“If you believe you can, you probably can. If you believe you won’t, you most assuredly won’t. Belief is the ignition switch that gets you off the launching pad.” – Denis Waitley
“To be a great champion you must believe you are the best. If you’re not, pretend you are.” – Muhammad Ali
“Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.” – Lou Holtz
“Excellence is not a skill. It is an attitude.” – Ralph Marston
“Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.” – Zig Ziglar
“Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out” – John Wooden
“If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.” – Colin Powell
“For success, attitude is equally as important as ability.” – Walter Scott
“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.” – Thomas Jefferson
“Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.” – Brian Tracy
“If you don’t like something change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.” – Mary Engelbreit
“Take the attitude of a student, never be too big to ask questions, never know too much to learn something new.” – Og Mandino
“A child’s attitude toward everything is an artist’s attitude.” – Willa Cather
“To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.” – George Santayana
“Humor prevents a hardening of the attitudes.” – Joel Goodman
“Our minds can shape the way a thing will be because we act according to our expectations.” – Federico Fellini
“A positive attitude can really make dreams come true – it did for me.” – David Bailey
“The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” – Viktor E. Frankl
“Take charge of your attitude. Don’t let someone else choose it for you.” – Anonymous
“In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.” – Albert Camus
“The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That’s the day we truly grow up.” – John C. Maxwell
“Our attitudes control our lives. Attitudes are a secret power working twenty-four hours a day, for good or bad. It is of paramount importance that we know how to harness and control this great force.” – Irving Berlin
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Find more quotes in The Essential List Of Creativity Quotes.

77 Quotes On Change

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Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes on change.
“Some men see things the way they are and ask, ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were, and ask ‘Why not?” — George Bernard Shaw
“A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.” — William James
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — Buckminster Fuller
“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.” – Charles Darwin
“Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.” – Bertold Brecht
“There is nothing permanent except change.” – Heraclitus
“Change alone is unchanging.” – Heraclitus
“Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
“Change is inevitable. Change is constant.” – Benjamin Disraeli
“Change brings opportunity.” – Nido Qubein
“Change in all things is sweet.” – Aristotle
“Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Browse The Essential Collection Of Creativity Quotes here. Read More

“Unlocking The Secrets Of The Creative Process – Part 3” A Conversation With Photographer Eric Meola

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Photographer Eric Meola and I share our insights on the creative process in this three-part conversation. In the third installment we discuss the role of chance and surprise in creativity.

EM: In describing how he wrote “Like a Rolling Stone,” Bob Dylan said that he found himself writing what he called “this long piece of vomit, 20 pages long.”

“And out of it,” he recalled, “I took ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and made it as a single. And I’d never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me.”

If nothing else, Dylan has always been incredibly prolific. “Practice, practice, practice,” says Bruce Springsteen. And then one day there’s your father’s image “Galaxy Apple.” Is that part of what process is about … the yin and yang between chaos and discipline?

JP: Process is how you get there. It doesn’t just happen. And it unfolds through time. The final results may have come quickly, but it took a long time for Dylan to get into the specific state of flow that would produce his song. The same is true for everyone, including photographers.

This reminds me of a time when I introduced a friend of mine to my father. He said, “Oh, you’re that photographer. Gosh I’d like to have your career. All those 1/125ths of a second. What’s that add up to? A 20-minute career?”

Dylan’s statement, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now,” seems related to Picasso’s “It takes a long time to grow young.”

EM: And Dylan as a teenager in Hibbing, Minnesota, used to listen all night to Hank Williams and Little Richard on the radio—it was all part of the “process” of gearing up for “Bringin’ It All Back Home.”

You mention using a Spirograph as a child to make circles, ellipses and various radiating designs. And some of these patterns continue to show up in your latest imagery. How important is a sense of wonder to photography, or any art form?

JP: How important is a sense of wonder to a life well lived? I think it’s essential. Keeping our sense of wonder alive and well increases our openness, curiosity, sensitivity, perception, playfulness, passion, pleasure, and many other positive benefits. This is related to keeping our inner child or the childlike (not childish) aspects of ourselves active and vibrant.

EM: We’ve discussed chaos versus discipline in art. What about a happy accident—serendipity? What role does “chance” play in process? In the film Pollock, Ed Harris shows Jackson Pollock stumbling onto the process for his drip paintings. Do you ever look at something you’ve done or have been thinking about and suddenly make a leap to a concept that had not occurred to you before? I’m also thinking of Kubrick’s famous visual metaphor early in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the ape throws a bone that morphs into a rotating space station.

JP: There are two questions here. My answer to both is yes …

Read the rest of Part 3 here.

Read Part 2 here.

Read Part 1 here.

Read my conversation with Eric Meola about Eric Meola here.

Preview my ebook Process here.

Find out about my exhibit Process here.

33 Quotes On Simplicity

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Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes on Simplicity.
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” ― Confucius
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” ― Henry David Thoreau
“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.” ― John Maeda
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” – Hans Hofmann
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” ― E.F. Schumacher
“Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.” – Edward Tuft
“Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.” – Alan Perlis
“Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.” – Martin H. Fischer
“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” – Steve Jobs
“Simplicity is the outcome of technical subtlety. It is the goal, not the starting point.” – Maurice Saatchi
“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
“The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler.” – Edward Teller
“The simplest things are often the truest.” – Richard Bach
“A vocabulary of truth and simplicity will be of service throughout your life.” – Winston Churchill
“Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.” ― Isaac Newton
“Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy” ― Isaac Newton
“As I grew older, I realized that it was much better to insist on the genuine forms of nature, for simplicity is the greatest adornment of art.” – Albrecht Durer
“I am not a genius, I am just curious. I ask many questions. and when the answer is simple, then God is answering.” ― Albert Einstein
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” – Albert Einstein
“The greatest ideas are the simplest.” ― William Golding
“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.” ― Leo Tolstoy
“Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.” – Bruce Lee
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” ― Leonardo da Vinci
“Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity.” – Plato
“Simplicity is the glory of expression.” – Walt Whitman
“In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” – William of Occam
“Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” – Frederic Chopin
“Simplicity is not an objective in art, but one achieves simplicity despite one’s self by entering into the real sense of things.” – Constantin Brancusi
“The more simple we are, the more complete we become.” ― August Rodin
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” ― Jack Kerouac
View The Essential Collection of Creativity Quotes here.
Discover more quotes daily in my Twitter and Facebook streams.

How A Just Few Words Can Change Your Perception / Photography – Sean Kernan

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Looking into the Light_Cover_smaller

An exercise too late for the book Looking Into The Light.

“I write to find out what I have to say.” Charles Wright

That’s how creativity works. You can try to conceptualize it all you want, but when you begin, it starts to come out completely different … if your lucky. Even if you do it all wrong, you learn more than you ever would by thinking.
That’s why exercises function as the heart of my workshops, and new ones occur to me all the time, so many that I never get to a fraction of them in a class.
The best of them literally take you beyond yourself. When that happens, you suddenly wake up way past whatever it was you thought you were going to do.  You’re like a kid who is learning to ride a bicycle and looks back to see the parent you thought was running beside you and steadying you standing 50 yards back and grinning. And you realize that you’ve been riding your bike and balancing just fine on your own.
That’s what I want out of an exercise.
This summer an idea came to me in the middle of a workshop. I told people to go out, wander around, and make photographs of a place where something had happened. That was it.
My thought was that at least it might get people to really pay attention and just be where they were, see the light, the energy, see what the place felt like. Then they could make some pictures.
So off they went to spend a rainy afternoon working this out, and the next morning we gathered to screen the pictures. When the first ones came up I got a surprise. People had actually written down the thing that they felt might have happened. And the things they had written down completely charged the pictures, and ignited the classes imaginations. They were like short clips from films, and they made you want to see the rest of it.
Here’s one. You’ll see what I mean.
Picture 1_Michelle Elloway
 

Michelle Elloway

I think this one with the swings was the first up, and the menace and sadness that grew out of the picture of these children’s playthings was palpable. Everyone felt the dark possibilities in it.
Here are a few more …
Picture 2_Antelo Devereux

Antelo Devereux

Picture 3_Kemal Berk Kocabagli

Kemal Berk Kocabagli

What I loved about what people did was that they took ordinary situations into their imaginations and made the pictures suggest stories without telling them. They left plenty of space for viewers to complete them in their own minds.  We all became participants.
So there it is, the perfect kind of exercise. It was kind of like finding a mushroom with a note that said Eat me. Whenever that happens … eat the mushroom!
Find out more about Sean Kernan’s ebook Looking Into The Light here.
Find out more about Sean Kernan here.

Sean Kernan’s new book won’t tell you what to see, but it can show you new ways to look.

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“Years ago I stumbled on what felt like a secret door into creativity in photography. The secret is that photographers don’t need to hope that creativity will turn up. It’s there in us. Creativity is not something we do, it’s something we are…all the time.” says Kernan.
“Sean Kernan has spent more than 30 years investigating ways that photographers find and use creativity. And all that insight now fills a workshop-in-a-book, Looking into the Light: Creativity and Photography, now available as an iBook.
Kernan’s book offers ways to get to that creativity for photographers at every level, bright beginner to jaded professional. It looks past cameras and technique to focus on our awareness. “We work on our awareness of all the things that happen before the click, which I’m convinced is where the wonder of our best seeing comes from.”
The book gives a series of concrete assignments that stimulate the visual imagination and change our pictures. The sign that they’re working is when we get a hit of the excitement we felt the first time we took a photograph that was way beyond anything we thought we could do.
The exercises are gathered from many areas—music, theater, writing—and they all involve simple things we already know how to do. We can use them to make better photos, or just to see more deeply into what is around us. The goal is to make pictures that talk to the world, not just to other photographers. As Jay Maisel put it, “You want to take more interesting pictures? Be a more interesting person!”
Looking into the Light illustrates the exercises with work from a distinguished group that includes John Paul Caponigro, Greg Heisler, Cig Harvey, Jay Gould, Dennis Darling, Adam Arkin, poet Gregory Orr, Ed Young, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Sol LeWitt, William Kentridge, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. There’s an iconoclastic essay on portraits by Duane Michals and links to interviews with Duane and Robert Frank.
To support reader’s efforts, the author has created a companion website at www.lookingintothelight.com, where readers can find further articles, watch instructive videos, and upload and share their own work on the assignments.”
Read 20 Questions with Sean Kernan here.