George Leonard Quotations

The ultimate creative capacity of the brain may be, for all practical purposes, infinite.

Competition is the spice of sports; but if you make spice the whole meal you'll be sick.

The universe is continually at its work of restructuring itself at a higher, more complex, more elegant level. The novelty, the new, more complex order, doesn't emerge from the present in a steady stream, nor at all places at the same rate. It comes, as all things do, in rhythmic waves; there will always be times and places of scarcity and stagnation and retrogression. Still, the long-term direction is clear. The intention of the universe is evolution.

Practice is the path of mastery.

Preventing the new generation from changing in any deep way is what most societies require of their educators.

Only the schools’ inefficiency can account for creativity surviving after age 25.

The subtle dance of the body joins us to the world.

Everything was God, holy; as God is total, so the driftwood branch was holy. This must be the stuff religion is made of.

Running, close companion to death, summons us to the most vivid acts of life. Our ancestors (we have forgotten) ran for food and for love, love and lust. For us, a prime symbol of sexuality is the automobile. For the ancients it was the chase, the foot race. Satyr and nymph, maiden and god, hot pursuit. The mythic hunters, Diana and Atalanta, available only to the males, men or gods, who could outrun them; death to all others.

It's fitting, then, that we begin this exploration of ourselves and of the world with music, and more specifically with a musical quality called vibrato. This pulsation that wells up within the sounded note can lead us to what is most spontaneous and creative in human life, and possibly even to deeper mysteries--to powers of knowing and doing which we have lost or given away during the epoch of civilization, and which perhaps we may now regain.

There is a human striving for self-transcendence. It's part of what makes us human. With all of our flaws we want to go a little bit further than we've gone before and maybe even further than anyone else has gone before.

What was once impossible now summons us to dismantle the walls between ourselves and our sisters and brothers, to dissolve the distinctions between flesh and spirit, to transcend the present limits of time and matter, to find, at last, not wealth or power but the ecstasy (so long forgotten) of commonplace, unconditional being. For the atom's soul is nothing but energy. Spirit blazes in the dullest of clay. The life of every woman or man-the heart of it-is pure and holy joy.

The simplest single-celled organism oscillates to a number of different frequencies, at the atomic, molecular, sub-cellular, and cellular levels. Microscopic movies of these organisms are striking for the ceaseless, rhythmic pulsation that is revealed. In an organism as complex as a human being, the frequencies of oscillation and the interactions between those frequencies are multitudinous.

History tells us more than we want to know about what is wrong with man, and we can hardly turn a page in the daily press without learning the specific time, place, and name of evil. But perhaps the most pervasive evil of all rarely appears in the news. This evil, the waste of human potential, is particularly painful to recognize for it strikes our parents and children, our friends and brothers, ourselves.

At the root of all power and motion, at the burning center of existence itself, there is music and rhythm.

The real juice of life, whether it be sweet or bitter, is to be found not nearly so much in the products of our efforts as in the process of living itself, in how it feels to be alive.

Of what is the body made? It is made of emptiness and rhythm. At the ultimate heart of the body, at the heart of the world, there is no solidity. Once again, there is only the dance.

In terms of the game theory, we might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt. Similarly, the geometry of life is designed to keep us at the point of maximum tension between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos. Every important call is a close one. We survive and evolve by the skin of our teeth. We really wouldn't want it any other way.

At the heart of each of us, whatever our imperfections, there exists a silence pulse of perfect rhythm which is absolutely individual and unique, and yet which connects us to everything else.

Perhaps the safest prediction we can make about the future is that it will surprise us.

The essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty.

Ultimately, human intentionality is the most powerful evolutionary force on this planet.

For the atom's soul is nothing but energy. Spirit blazes in the dullest of clay. The life of every woman or man - the heart of it - is pure and holy joy.

Mastery is the art of setting your foot on the path.

To learn is to change.

For a master, the rewards gained along the way are fine, but they are not the main reason for the journey. Ultimately the master and the master's path are one. And if the traveler is fortunate - that is, if the path is complex and profound enough - the destination is two miles farther away for every mile he or she travels.

If you intend to take the journey of mastery, the best thing you can do is to arrange for first-rate instruction.

Not to dream more boldly may turn out to be, in view of present realities, simply irresponsible.

How to begin the journey? You need only to take the first step. When? There is always now.

Now here is a key: you want to make it real and present in the realm of your consciousness. You don't say "I'm going to do such and such" - it already has happened. Now, is consciousness real? It exists and it is very powerful. The idea is to have this mesh between your consciousness - your visualization - and the so-called material world.

The more you move in rhythm with someone, the closer you become with that person.

Mastery is a journey, and that the master must have the courage to risk failure.

At the root of all power and motion, there is music and rhythm, the play of patterned frequencies against the matrix of time, Before we make music, music makes us.

What if you're practicing wrong? Then you get very good at doing something wrong.

The essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty. Satisfaction lies in mindful repetition, the discovery of endless richness in subtle variations on familiar themes.

Keep practicing, even when you seem to be getting nowhere.

Perhaps we'll never know how far the path can go, how much a human being can truly achieve, until we realize that the ultimate reward is not a gold medal but the path itself.

At the heart of it, mastery is practice. Mastery is staying on the path.

To love the plateau is to love what is most essential and enduring in your life.

It's easy to get on the path of mastery. The real challenge lies in staying on it.

Even without comparing ourselves to the world's greatest, we set such high standards for ourselves that neither we nor anyone else could ever meet them-and nothing is more destructive to creativity than this. We fail to realize that mastery is not about perfection. It's about a process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for as long as he or she lives.

Education is... doing anything that changes you.

How do you best move toward mastery? To put it simply, you practice diligently, but you practice primarily for the sake of the practice itself.