Morley

24 Beautiful Life Lessons That Show Us Famous Artists Face The Same Struggles We Do

Above all else it's about leaving a mark that I existed. 
Ioana Cristina Casapu
July 20, 2016
“Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose …
 ”
— Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Félix González-Torres
Tagged: Love, Life Is A Journey, Beauty Of Life, Architecture Of Happiness, Simplicity
“Being awake is love. That’s what it is. It’s certainly not hate. It’s certainly not fear. But what it is, it’s a sense of being not separate from all the suffering and all of the emptiness, all of the compassion, all of the wisdom, all of the liberation, and all of the enslavement, to understand we’re all that.

We’re in a threshold experience right now. We’re in this kind of situation where we don’t have any time to waste. And I like the Zen evening verse that we chant that goes, ‘Life and death are of supreme importance. Time passes swiftly, and the opportunity is lost. Let us awaken, awaken. Do not squander your life.”
— Joan Halifax, Occupy Love
Tagged: Love, Freedom, Architecture Of Happiness, Pursuit of Happiness, Zen Philosophy, Life Is A Journey
“The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.”
— Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway
Tagged: Life Is A Journey, Trust, Psychology, Philosophy, Architecture Of Happiness
“Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
Tagged: Loneliness, Pain, Life Is A Journey, Sensitivity, vulnerability, Emotion
“The moment you feel like you have to prove your worth to someone is the moment to absolutely and utterly walk away.”
— Alysia Harris, Alysia Harris
Tagged: Life Is A Journey, Walking Away, Worth, Psychology
“I don’t pay attention to the
world ending.
it has ended for me
many times
and began again in the morning.”
— Nayyirah Waheed, Poems
Tagged: poem, Poetry, Writers, Life
“Power is being told you're not loved and not being destroyed by it”
— Madonna, Author Of "The English Roses"
Tagged: Love, Pursuit of Happiness, Power, Destruction, Philosophy
“When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.”
— Paulo Coehlo, The Devil And Miss Prym
Tagged: Love, Sacrifice, Destiny, Challenge, Life
“Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.”
— Vincent Van Gogh, The Letters Of Vincent Van Gogh
Tagged: Love, To Paint Is To Love Again, Life Is A Journey, strength
“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Tagged: Friendship, Life Is A Journey, Having Fun
“Don’t google your name. Ever.
Don’t ‘search’ for yourself
on anything that glows in the dark.
Don’t let your beauty
be something anyone can turn off.
Don’t edit your ugly out of your bio.
Let your light come from the fire.
Let your pain be the spark,
but not the timber.
Remember, you didn’t come here
to write your heart out.
You came to write it in.”
— Andrea Gibson, Slam Poetry
Tagged: Poetry, Slam Poetry, Google, Darkness, Love, Spark, Pain, Life Is A Journey
“You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it.”
— Robin Williams, A quote by Robin Williams
Tagged: Madness, Spark, Beauty Of Life, Pursuit of Happiness, Melancholia
“The conversation between your fingers and someone else’s skin. This is the most important discussion you can ever have.”
— Iain Thomas, 25 Love Poems For The NSA
Tagged: Conversation, Skin Deep, Love, Sensuality, Passion, Writers
“From a very early time, I understood that I only learn from things I don’t like. If you do things you like, you just do the same shit. You always fall in love with the wrong guy. Because there’s no change. It’s so easy to do things you like. But then, the thing is, when you’re afraid of something, face it, go for it. You become a better human being.”
— Marina Abramovic, An Interview With The Guardian
Tagged: Change, Technology of Wishing, Pursuit of Happiness, Life Is A Journey, Philosophy
“Love hasn't got anything to do with the heart, the heart's a disgusting organ, a sort of pump full of blood. Love is primarily concerned with the lungs. People shouldn't say "she's broken my heart" but "she's stifled my lungs." Lungs are the most romantic organs: lovers and artists always contract tuberculosis. It's not a coincidence that Chekhov, Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Chopin, George Orwell and St Thérèse of Lisieux all died of it; as for Camus, Moravia, Boudard and Katherine Mansfield, would they have written the same books if it weren't for TB?”
— Frederic Beigbeder, 99 Francs
Tagged: Love, Misery, Heartbreak, Passion, Pain
“I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.”
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Tagged: Comfort, Technology of Wishing, Truth, Love, Pursuit of Happiness, Philosophy
“My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day.

I told them this story:
In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.”
— Tom Waits, Innocent When You Dream
Tagged: humor, Individuality, Music, Musician, Life Is A Journey, Fable
“Use your faults, use your defects; then you're going to be a star.”
— Edith Piaf, Edith Piaf
Tagged: Faults, Love, Star, Freedom, Individuality, Power
“Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.”
— Frida Kahlo, The Diary Of Frida Kahlo
Tagged: Laughter, Pursuit of Happiness, Painter, Tragedy
“...because once you've got one scar on your face or your heart, its only a matter of time before someone gives you another - and another - until a day doesn't go by when you aren't being bashed senseless, nor a town that you haven't been run out of, and you get to be such a goddamn mess that finally it doesn't feel right unless you're getting the Christ beaten out of you - and within a year of that first damming fall, those first down borne fists, your first run out, you wind up with flies buzzing around your eyes, back at the same place, the same town, deader than when you left, bobbing around in the swill - a dirty deadbeat whore in a roadside ditch. But a little part of you doesn't die. A little part of you lives on. And you make an orphan of that corrupt and contemptible part, dumping it right smack in the laps of the ones who first robbed you of your sweetness, for it is the wicked fruit of their crimes, it is their blood, their sin, it belongs there, this child of blood, this spawn of sin..”
— Nick Cave, And The Ass Saw The Angel
Tagged: Growing Pains, Musician, Music, Writers, Blood, Childhood, Drama, Surrender, Survival
“School was a very cruel environment, and I was a loner. But I learnt to get hurt, and I learnt to cope with it.”
— Kate Bush, Kate Bush
Tagged: Singer, Musician, Cruelty, School, Individuality, Loneliness, hurt, Coping With Pain
“Make love
like you have no
secrets
like you’ve
never been
left
never been
hurt
like the world
don’t owe you a
single
wretched
thing.”
— Warsan Shire, Make Love
Tagged: Love, Lovemaking, Sensuality, poem, Poetry, Writers, Poets
“I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.”
— John Keats, The Complete Poems
Tagged: poem, Poetry, Poets, Failure, Fear, Life Is A Journey
“Sometimes while I ride the subway I try to look at each person and imagine what they look like to someone who is totally in love with them. I think everyone has had someone look at them that way, whether it was a lover, or a parent, or a friend, whether they know it or not. It’s a wonderful thing, to look at someone to whom I would never be attracted and think about what looking at them feels like to someone who is devouring every part of their image, who has invisible strings that are connected to this person tied to every part of their body. I think this fun pastime is a way of cultivating compassion. It feels good to think about people that way, and to use that part of my mind that I think is traditionally reserved for a tiny portion of people I’ll meet in my life to appreciate the general public.”
— Dean Spade, For Lovers And Fighters
Tagged: Love, Life Is A Journey, Compassion, Technology of Wishing, Pursuit of Happiness