Sarah Lewis > Quotes

“Mizuta Masahide’s haiku: “My barn having burned down / I can now see the moon.”
― Sarah Lewis, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

“Mastery requires endurance. Mastery, a word we don’t use often, is not the equivalent of what we might consider its cognate—perfectionism—an inhuman aim motivated by a concern with how others view us. Mastery is also not the same as success—an event-based victory based on a peak point, a punctuated moment in time. Mastery is not merely a commitment to a goal, but to a curved-line, constant pursuit.”
― Sarah Lewis, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

“A fuller vision comes from our ability to recognize the fallibility in our current and past forms of sight.”
― Sarah Lewis, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

“If you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place . . . If you’re rooted to a spot, you miss a lot of the grace.”
― Sarah Lewis, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

“How many movements began when an aesthetic encounter indelibly changed our past perceptions of the world? It was an abolitionist’s print, not logical argument, which dealt the final blow to the slave trade—the broadside of Description of a Slave Ship (1789).”
― Sarah Lewis, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

“You reach a point where you’re at the bottom of hell, yet you have your arms crossed and a smile on your face, and you feel you’re the luckiest person on earth.”
― Sarah Lewis, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

“The word failure is imperfect. Once we begin to transform it, it ceases to be that any longer. The term is always slipping off the edges of our vision, not simply because it's hard to see without wincing, but because once we are ready to talk about it, we often call the event something else--a learning experience, a trial, a reinvention--no longer the static concept of failure.”
― Sarah Lewis, The Cross and the Crescent

“Geim’s perspective, blunt as you like, is that it’s “better to be wrong than be boring,” so he lets those working on the FNEs stay free enough to take risks and, inevitably, fail.16”
― Sarah Lewis, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

“found graphene hiding out in the graphite from an ordinary pencil.”
― Sarah Lewis, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery