39+ Robert Grudin Quotes On Education, Art Of Living And Creative

Robert Grudin is an American author and professor of English. He is known for his works on aesthetics, culture, and the history of ideas. He has written several books, including Time and the Art of Living, The Grace of Great Things, and The Reenchantment of the World. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Robert Grudin on leadership, life, education.

Top 10 Robert Grudin Quotes

1. True teachers not only impart knowledge and method but awaken the love of learning by their own reflected love.
2. All great experience has a guarded entrance and a windowless facade.
3. We pamper the present like a spoiled child, obeying its superficial demands but ignoring its real needs.
4. 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.
5. Excellence of mind itself, rightly conceived, is expertise in beauty; creativity is wise love.
6. The future is like the daytime moon, a diffident but faithful companion, so elegant as to be almost invisible, an inconspicuous marvel.
7. Happiness may well consist primarily of an attitude toward time.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Those who labor for bread or money alone are condemned to their reward.
• Psychologically time is seldom homogenous but rather is as full of shapes as space.
• The fundamental motive of true teaching is the love that seeks and studies and performs.
• The goal of discoverers is not to outdistance their peers, but to transcend themselves.

Robert Grudin Quotes About Creative

The recalling of beautiful things, whether they are your own experiences or the acheivements of others, is a creative act. Simple ideas can be restated by rote; but profound ideas must be recreated by will and imagination. — Robert Grudin

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

Because it is a radical act of freedom, creative achievement is a heroic process that requires, in all its permutations, specific strengths of character. — Robert Grudin

We commonly think of freedom as the ability to define alternatives and choose between them. The creative mind exceeds this liberty in being able to redefine itself and reality at large, generating whole new sets of alternatives. — Robert Grudin

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

Robert Grudin Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

That morning I experienced vividly, if almost subliminally, the reality of change itself: how it fools our sentinels and undermines our defenses, how careful we are to look for it in the wrong places, how it does not reveal itself until it is beyond redress, how vainly we search for it around us and find too late that is has occurred within us. — Robert Grudin

Truth is rhythmical: if it implies stasis, it is platitude. Truth is syncopated: if it supplies all the terms, there is one term too many. Truth is barbed: if it comforts, it lies. Truth is an armed dancer. — Robert Grudin

The mind which can totally and inanely forget its work and obligations is often also the mind which can, at the proper time, give them the fullest attention. — Robert Grudin

At pains to define liberty, that most resolute of indefinables, our minds fall back on spatial images; on birds, sailboats, and mountains; the untethered balloon, the blue sky, the nude figure. — Robert Grudin

Individuals we consider happy commonly seem complete in the present and we see them constantly in their wholeness: attentive, cheerful, open rather than closed to events, integral in the moment rather than distended across time by regret or anxiety. — Robert Grudin

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

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

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

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

The reason so many promises are not kept is the same as the reason they are made in the first place. — Robert Grudin

The limitation in our ability to perceive broad distinctions in scope can be applied to our moral and temporal responses.... We agonize over a dinner menu, or have engine trouble on the way to work; and for seconds or minutes our cosmos shrinks to a miniscule volume of being, an epic of cheese sauces or tragedy of fanbelts. — Robert Grudin

True intimacy is a human constant. People of all types find it equally hard to achieve, equally precious to hold. Age, education, social status, make little difference here; even genius does not presuppose the talent to reveal one's self completely and completely absorb one's self in another personality. Intimacy is to love what concentration is to work: a simultaneous drawing together to attention and release of energy. — Robert Grudin

Plans made swiftly and intuitively are likely to have flaws. Plans made carefully and comprehensively are sure to. — Robert Grudin

No psychological message is so open to question as that which tells us that we have nothing left to do or to give. — Robert Grudin

We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day. — Robert Grudin

Free men and women... can think across time, viewing their own lives, inclusive of past, present, and future, as architectural wholes, static in mental space. They can therefore see, as others cannot, the cracks and buttresses of repeated action, the points of stress, the established framework. They are not perfect; but they are less imperfect than we by a full dimension of being. — Robert Grudin

Such self-transformation is the most difficult and dangerous challenge to the imagination, and it is the most rewarding. Meeting it is only possible for the person whose mind is open to contradictions and well-practiced in free conjecture. — Robert Grudin

What liberates the imagination is the sense that work in its theory and practice holds aesthetic possibilities, that jobs can be elegantly conceived and gracefully done. This sense of beauty unlocks feelings of pleasure and love and breaks down the barrier between worker and work and commit to work not merely the "thinking" consciousness but the full resources of mind. — Robert Grudin

Life Lessons by Robert Grudin

1. Robert Grudin's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the past in order to shape the future, and that the power of art and literature can be used to bridge the gap between the two.
2. He also highlights the need for individuals to be mindful of their own actions and to take responsibility for the consequences of those actions.
3. Finally, Grudin's work points to the importance of cultivating a sense of curiosity and openness to new ideas in order to be able to effectively engage with the world.