A creative endeavor often feels like climbing a rugged, treacherous mountain. One slip and you’ll fall to your doom. Yet, the analogy has many positives, too. Here are ten quotes to inspire your climb up your creative mountain.
Know Your Why
The summit is what drives us, but the climb itself is what matters.
Conrad Anker
There’s no glory in climbing a mountain if all you want to do is to get to the top. It’s experiencing the climb itself – in all its moments of revelation, heartbreak, and fatigue – that has to be the goal.
Karyn Kusama
Don’t Give Up
Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.
Michael Jordan
The climb might be tough and challenging, but the view is worth it. There is a purpose for that pain; you just can’t always see it right away.
Victoria Arlen
Always continue the climb. It is possible for you to do whatever you choose, if you first get to know who you are and are willing to work with a power that is greater than ourselves to do it.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Every mountain top is within reach if you just keep climbing.
Barry Finlay
Remove all the Pebbles
It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.
Muhammad Ali
We often generate the pebbles in our shoes to protect ourselves from failure. We say to ourselves that we can’t possibly do this creative thing for so long when we have xyzy going on in our lives. Sometimes those pebbles are real and require our attention. But take the pebble out for ten minutes a day and climb that mountain of creativity inside you.
Try Another Mountain
Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test it’s a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.
Frank Herbert
Sometimes you climb the mountain, and you fall and fail. Maybe there is a different path that will take you up. Sometimes a different mountain.
Caterina Fake
If you are more enthralled with being the creator than doing the creating, you might consider finding another mountain. If you can’t enjoy the climb, find one you can and will. A different mountain isn’t bad. It’s just different. Take joy in that.
Remember:
It’s not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves. Sir Edmund Hilary
There are two kinds of climbers: those who climb because their heart sings when they’re in the mountains, and all the rest.
Alex Lowe
Find the things you need to inspire your climb up your mountain to your creative destiny. Maybe it won’t be joyful for 100% of the time, but take a moment during those down times. Remember why you climb. Lift your eyes to that summit and climb.
Image Credits:
Top: Ice Climber by Simon from Pixabay
Middle: Rock Climber by TeeFarm from Pixabay
Bottom: Mountain top by Fernando50 from Pixabay
Thanks for the quotes.
The base camp is long behind; I’m at that last camp before the summit. I can’t wait to get to the view, but unclimbable rocks, snow, and ice must be mastered. And the end of a novel is one of the hardest things a writer faces.
Until we look around from the summit. And it’s all worth it.
The summit is what we aim for, certainly. The learning, growing, climbing-they are worth it, too, but there are summits that dazzle. I know yours will.