John Cleese Quotes

The Buddhists have a phrase for this — “Beginner’s Mind” — expressing how experience can be more vivid when it’s not dulled by familiarity.

But perhaps the biggest interruption coming from your inside is caused by your worrying about making a mistake.

but the insanity of punishing someone physically for getting an answer wrong. It is terrifying how much of this deeply unkind, utterly pointless, in fact, mind-bogglingly COUNTERPRODUCTIVE kind of behaviour was meted out to children over the centuries by half-witted, power-crazed zombies like this heinous old bat — a large proportion of such psychopaths allegedly acting in the name of an all-loving God

We moved back to the Raffles', then back to Devon (to Horrabridge, where I saw a spider so big I could hear its footsteps).

When James Thurber described humour (or humor) as “emotional chaos remembered in tranquility” he was only pointing out that things that seem very important at the time usually aren’t, and that it’s not unkind to laugh at temporary upsets, especially when they’re our own. In fact, it’s rightly considered healthy to be able to laugh at oneself, and we all much prefer people who do not take themselves “too seriously.” A good sense of humour is the sign of a healthy perspective, which is why people who are uncomfortable around humour are either pompous (inflated) or neurotic (oversensitive). Pompous people mistrust humour because at some level they know their self-importance cannot survive very long in such an atmosphere, so they criticise it as “negative” or “subversive.” Neurotics, sensing that humour is always ultimately critical, view it as therefore unkind and destructive, a reductio ad absurdum which leads to political correctness.

here’s my advice: get your panic in early! The good thing about panic is that it gives you energy.

Getting discouraged is a total waste of your time.

So “borrow” an idea from someone you admire — an idea that really appeals to you personally.

Tortoise Mind.” “Hare Brain.” They need each other. But keep them separate!

learning from something or someone you admire is not stealing. It’s called “being influenced by.

Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.” — John Cleese

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once said, “You can’t have a new idea ’til you’ve got rid of an old one.

I made my first public appearance on the stairs up to the school nurse's room, at St. Peter's Preparatory School, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, on September 13, 1948.

You can do the creation and then criticize it, but you can't do them at the same time. So if you're worried about offending people and constantly thinking of that, you are not going to be very creative. So I think it has a disastrous effect.

But I think it's particularly worrying at the moment because you can only create in an atmosphere of freedom, where you're not checking everything you say critically before you move on. What you have to be able to do is to build without knowing where you're going because you've never been there before. That's what creativity is—you have to be allowed to build. And a lot of comedians now are sitting there and when they think of something, they say something like, 'Can I get away with it? I don't think so. So and so got into trouble, and he said that, oh, she said that.' You see what I mean? And that's the death of creativity. So I would say at the moment, this is a difficult time, particularly for young comedians, but you see, my audience is much older, and they're simply not interested in most of the woke attitudes. I mean, they just think that you should try and be kind to people and that's no need to complicate it, you know?