Robert Fritz Quotes

"What motivates a creator? The desire for the creation to exist. A creator creates in order to bring the creation into being. People in the reactive-responsive orientation often have trouble understanding this sensibility: to create for the sake of the creation itself. Not for the praise, not for the "return on investment," not for what it may say about you, *but for its own sake.*
Poet Robert Frost captured the spirit of the orientation of the creative when he said:
"All the great things are done for their own sake."
...
When you separate yourself from your creations, you can experience one of the most profound understandings of creativity - love. *The reason you would create anything is because you love it enough to see it exist.*"

Often, the person reaches a point where there is a choice between two conflicting interests: reducing the emotional discomfort or seeing what is really going on. The person needs to make a value choice at this point. Which is more important to you, seeing reality or feeling okay? Almost always, the person chooses to see reality, and therefore, to let the emotional chips fall wherever they may.

In the creative process you do not make choices about what you do not want. You make choices about what you do want.

Secondary choices are always subordinate to a primary choice. Often there is no reason to make such choices outside the context of the primary choice that calls for them.

Athletes and musicians may not enjoy practicing long hours, but they do so just the same; not out of duty, obligation, or any other form of self-manipulation, but because they are making secondary choices consistent with their primary choice to be able to perform music or excel at sports.

The human spirit will not invest itself in a compromise.

It is natural for us to avoid pain and conflict. So, seeking the truth is not something we do by nature. It is a discipline, and like every discipline, is not natural. As we build our life as art, one discipline we will need to master is fluency in reality. We need to know exactly how it is. We will need to raise our level of objectivity, discernment, and awareness.

Because humanity is part of nature, it should be no surprise that people act consistently with natural law. But for most of us, this is a new idea. In our culture we have been taught to ignore our relationship to nature, to treat nature simply as the stage or background that we use, adopt, tolerate, or oppose, as the case may be.

Some teachers think they are preparing their students for life by teaching them that the choices they have are limited. Thus the real lesson they teach is compromise: Learn to live with what you don't really like because you will have plenty of that.

It's not what the vision is, it's what the vision does.

If you limit your choice to only what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself form what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.

Once a structure exists, energy moves through that structure by the path of least resistance. In other words, energy moves where it is easiest for it to go.

You got to where you are in your life right now by moving along the path of least resistance.

Hector Berlioz’s witty comment, “Time is the great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all of its students.

What is wrong with positive thinking? In a word — truth.

When you merely choose a process, you do not establish structural tension, and you do not make energy available to complete the creative process.