One day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of.
Interpretation
Freedom from others' opinions allows true creativity and self-expression.
This quote by J.D. Salinger suggests that achieving true artistic expression and creative output comes when one no longer feels the need to seek approval from others. It implies that as individuals mature and let go of societal expectations and judgments, they unlock their potential and create work that is authentic and reflective of their true selves.
In practice
During a motivational speech about pursuing one's passion despite external pressures.
Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.
I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete — that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.
Each of his phrases was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey.
My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. he was left handed. The thing that was descriptive about it though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up to bat
Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew--knew--that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?
You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you.
It is true that from a behavioral economics perspective we are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman. So from this perspective it is rather depressing. But at the same time there is also a silver lining. There are free lunches!
If wisdom were offered me with this restriction, that I should keep it close and not communicate it, I would refuse the gift.
Without the freedom to criticize, there is no true praise.
Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day.
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The technique of positive thinking is not a technique that transforms you. It is simply repressing the negative aspects of your personality. It is a method of choice. It cannot help awareness; it goes against awareness. Awareness is always choiceless.
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