Blessed Are the Weird Quotes

“The art of living is to fall in love
with life over and over again.
It is no easy thing to walk through the world
with an open heart, embracing everything,
and also stand true,
allowing no poison to affect us.
But be cracked open often.
Pour yourself into life withholding nothing.
Heal and be healed,
This is the way of living in full.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“Relax into this understanding—nothing is wasted. All of your experiences, all of the broken pieces of relationships and half-formed careers, everything you are and have been—it may appear to be a basket of dusty shards, but come with me now and meet other creators so you can see that, somehow, every jagged little piece of you will find its place in a kaleidoscope of brilliance if you stay with the task of becoming yourself.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“Your weirdness will make you stronger, your dark side will keep you whole, your vulnerability will connect you to the suffering of our world, your creativity will set you free. There is nothing wrong with you.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame, and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them, I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter, and all the mad intensities that made and unmade”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“We, the world, want our soul back.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“Success in this brave new era does not look like success as it has always been defined before—and neither does failure. The only success now is living and creating a work-of-art life: unique, rich with meaning, naked of anything we don’t care about, and ruthless about carving out something absolutely real from a world that has gorged itself on fakeness and become critically ill from it. The only failure now is pulling back from that quest because of fear. In”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“I can’t change the world or solve its problems. That’s too much. Too big. But I can turn and honestly face my own problems, fears, and pain. I can learn to love myself. I can love and serve those within my own arms’ reach. I can turn my own life into art. Somehow when I do this, my life is enough and I have done my part.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“If you want to test this and feel how hot the flame of honesty burns, try it next time you are tempted to play some kind of shadow game to get sex, to get a raise, or to get attention. Ask, “… if I told the simple truth about my needs and desires in this moment, what would happen?”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren’t any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn’t be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“Your superpower is your sensitivity. Your sensitivity is also your Achilles’ heel. Your greatest gift to the world is on the flip side of the same coin as your greatest wound. In fact, if you aren’t sure what your gift is yet, take a look at what always brings you down—take a look at your darkest, weakest stuff. That will give you clues. On the reverse side of your deepest shadow, you will find your brightest light.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“Art is what happens when we have time for something other than basic survival.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“nameless desperation that haunts us in this world we have created—a world of boxes and cubicles and endless meetings and false urgency to do things we don’t give a shit about.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“Living out a creative life means taking ultimate responsibility for everything in it. It means that we are not waiting for anyone or anything to come along and give us the keys to happiness. It also means that we become leaders by example of what is possible when an individual lives by their own lights.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“You have left a trail of breadcrumb clues that will lead you to the place where your purpose and passion have already met and are simply waiting for you to find them.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“we can’t bear the risk that it might not pay off in ways that society values. Fuck society!”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“The Muses get impatient when we refuse to pay attention to their nudges.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“And Abraham Maslow wrote, “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“We are desperate to feel that our lives matter and we have a terrible suspicion that they might not.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“The problem is that we have forgotten how to make our own lives works of art and we cannot seem to find enough ways to gorge ourselves to fill the aching sense of emptiness this leaves behind.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“But there is a deep sense of anxiety that pervades our entire civilizaton right now. Something is not right. All of our machines and finely-tuned processes and the massive acceleration of life’s pace are starting to sound and feel a lot like a poorly loaded washing machine that goes “whomp … whomp … whomp … whomp-whomp-WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMMMMP!” when the spin cycle takes off. Something doesn’t feel right. Something is telling us that there is imbalance in the world, perhaps as a result of all of our advances”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“Success for anything or anyone is becoming what it was designed to be. That’s it.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“When we understand that our unique selves and the lives we live are meant to be art, all of us can accept this dare to challenge the status quo. What I mean by status quo is the soul-deadening homogeny that stands there like a great, stupid thug blocking us from passing through the gate into a life that is satisfying because it is our own.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“We don’t know what our purpose for living is and we are terrified to admit it to anyone—especially ourselves.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“she also shows up with reminders that life is good, that my spirit is on a beautiful journey here as me, and that all of this is worth it.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“the corrosive influence of television,”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“This is where we are right now, as a whole. No one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“Anaïs Nin seduces me into raw truth and beauty and courage. “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“one warning stands out—when humans create a world that is wildly out of sync with the laws of nature, disaster strikes as an inevitable rebalancing occurs.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“He wrote, “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives

“In the gnostic Gospel of Thomas, it is written, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
― Jacob Nordby, Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives