It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions

 --- Martha Graham, quoted in Agnes de Mille,  Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham (1991), cited in Maria Popova, Martha Graham on the Life-Force of Creativity and the Divine Dissatisfaction of Being an Artist, themarginalian

From themarginalian piece

In 1943, De Mille was hired to choreograph the musical Oklahoma!, which became an overnight sensation and ran for a record-setting 2,212 performances. Feeling that critics and the public had long ignored work into which she had poured her heart and soul, De Mille found herself dispirited by the sense that something she considered “only fairly good” was suddenly hailed as a “flamboyant success.” Shortly after the premiere, she met Graham “in a Schrafft’s restaurant over a soda” for a conversation that put into perspective her gnawing grievance and offered what De Mille considered the greatest thing ever said to her. She recounts the exchange:

I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.

Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.”

“But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.”

“No artist is pleased.”

“But then there is no satisfaction?”

“No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

when evaluating [conspiracy] theories, one should focus on the most plausible versions

 --- Kurtis Hagen, Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style: Do Conspiracy Theories Posit Implausibly Vast and Evil Conspiracies?, Social Epistemology, 2018

Abstract

In the social science literature, conspiracy theories are commonly characterized as theories positing a vast network of evil and preternaturally effective conspirators, and they are often treated, either explicitly or implicitly, as dubious on this basis. This characterization is based on Richard Hofstadter’s famous account of ‘the paranoid style’. However, many significant conspiracy theories do not have any of the relevant qualities. Thus, the social science literature provides a distorted account of the general category ‘conspiracy theory’, conflating it with a subset of that category that encourages unfairly negative evaluations of conspiracy theories. Generally, when evaluating theories, one should focus on the most plausible versions; the merit of a theory is independent of the existence of less plausible versions of it. By ignoring this and glossing over important distinctions, many academics, especially in the social sciences, have misclassified many conspiracy theories and in doing so have contributed to an epistemically unfair depiction of them. Further, even theories that genuinely fit the description of ‘the paranoid style’ cannot be completely dismissed on that basis. All conspiracy theories ought to be judged on the totality of their individual merits.

Agency is a really core property of living things that we almost take for granted, it’s so basic

 --- Kevin Mitchell, geneticist and neuroscientist, quoted in Clare Wilson, Free will: Can neuroscience reveal if your choices are yours to make?, New Scientist, 30 September 2023

Excerpt

And neuroscience isn’t the only branch of biology that has something to say about free will, says Mitchell. “If we want to understand how human beings do things – that is, where causal power [for our actions] comes from – then that question extends back to say: ‘Well, how does any organism do something?'” The answer, says Mitchell, lies in the evolution of biological agency, or the ability to act with intention or purpose, an argument he makes in his new book Free Agents: How evolution gave us free will.

As Mitchell sees it, when the first simple life forms appeared on Earth about 3.7 billion years ago, one of their most interesting essential qualities was that they did stuff. Before that, things happened: grains of sand tumbled around, chemicals reacted and volcanoes spewed out lava. But those were inert physical processes. The first life forms, however, used energy to work against the second law of thermodynamics – the principle that everything tends to become more disorganised over time – and hence stay alive. “Agency is a really core property of living things that we almost take for granted, it’s so basic,” says Mitchell.

Your characters are defined by their stories, and your story consists in nothing other than the actions of its characters

 --- Steven Koch (this guy, I think), quoted by InCinematic (Luke Custer) in When the "parody" surpasses the original (time code 3:11), YouTube,  2024

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away

 --- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in Airman's Odyssey per Goodreads

h/t redditor u/Simply-Serendipitous for posting this in the thread Evolution of SpaceX' Raptor rocket engine in r/Damnthatsinteresting, Aug 2024