Better to operate with detachment, then; better to have a way but infuse it with a little humor; best, to have no way at all but to have instead the wit constantly to make one's way anew from the materials at hand.
Interpretation
Embrace flexibility and humor in your approach to life, rather than rigidly adhering to a fixed path.
This quote emphasizes the value of detachment and adaptability in navigating life's challenges. By suggesting that it is better to approach problems with humor and creativity rather than adhering strictly to a predetermined path, Hyde encourages individuals to embrace spontaneity and resourcefulness in crafting their own unique solutions.
In practice
In a speech about navigating career changes, one could use this quote to encourage adaptability.
All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she has extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind-states may well attend her creativity.
Unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved. When gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges.
But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.
Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.
An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.
For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.
A good man doubles the length of his existence; to have lived so as to look back with pleasure on our past existence is to live twice.
Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself.
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft.
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