Why is it that so few people are truly free? Because they try to conform to ideas, concepts, and beliefs in their heads.
Will is guided by wisdom. Wisdom comes from introspection, looking inside yourself, probing, studying the wisdom of the teachers, the masters and bringing that into your mind.
What is that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.
In the future, as in the past, the great ideas [of mathematics] must be simplifying ideas, the creator must always be one who clarifies, for himself, and for others, the most complicated issues of formulas and concepts.
Every morning I'd have coffee with my wife and we would discuss ideas. Sixty percent of what I did for the stores was concepts. The other forty percent was correcting and cleaning up other concepts in house, or doing final art on my concepts. Most of my concepts were so finished they could turn them over to somebody else.
You explore concepts and things that interest you, but you are also exploring inside of yourself.
A man demonstrates his rationality, not by a commitment to fixed ideas, stereotyped procedures, or immutable concepts, but by the manner in which, and the occasions on which, he changes those ideas, procedures, and concepts.
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.
Don't let yourself be weighed down by what other people think, because in a few years, in a few decades, or in a few centuries, that way of thinking will have changed. Live now what others will only live in the future.
Experience is the best teacher. But in our day and time, what we need is wisdom, because wisdom overcomes experience, because experience is wisdom, but there's a level of wisdom that overcomes the experience, and that's the experience that's already lived by others. I'm not trying to repeat the histories. I already learned from what they did.
A nation orients itself by its own geniuses, and derives from them its ideas of its own ideals, but the guiding star serves also as a light to other nations. As speech has been created by a few great men, the most extraordinary wisdom lies concealed in it, a wisdom which reveals itself to a few ardent explorers but which is usually overlooked by the stupid professional philologists.
You can only be you when you do your best. When you don't do your best you are denying yourself the right to be you. That's a seed that you should really nurture in your mind. You don't need knowledge or great philosophical concepts. You don't need the acceptance of others. You express your own divinity by being alive and by loving yourself and others.
I suggest you take a look at yourself. Not the concepts, not the ideas, not the goods, not the bads. But a timeless purity of existence. A witness to the beauty that is.
I personally think the best ideas for TV shows - at least comedies - are very low-fi ideas. High concepts often sell pitches in movies and TV, but, especially in TV when you're talking about hopefully a 100 or 150 episode proposition, those concepts just burn off, and then you're stuck with nothing.
Do you depend on others for motivation - or can you motivate yourself?
Make yourself your role model, because people who do not have qualities depend on the qualities of others to shape their own qualities.