Conor O'Driscoll

It seems to me that the most pleasing thing you can find yourself saying in a conversation is something you haven’t said before.

I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: ‘This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.’ Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: ‘This is not a world, this is nothing, there’s no way to live at all.’

There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.

The most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.

We are always, at all times, the people we were and the people we are going to be.

It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.

Now might be a good time to remind everyone that the easiest way to discriminate is to make stringent rules, then to decide when and for whom to enforce them.

You can’t hold the world in your head. Better to acknowledge the difficulty, though, than succumb to the abstractions.

In the history of Art, unlike the history of Science, though there are periods of flowering and sterility, there is no such thing as Progress, only Change.

For me it is enough to have the first and the last word — the middle we can discuss.

What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until that happens, until a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?

Many things in the world around me seem to me ugly, wasteful, foolish, cruel, destructive, and wicked. How much of this should I talk to children about? I tend to feel, not much. I prefer to let, or help, children explore as much of the world as they can, and then make up their own minds about it. If they ask me what I think about something, I will tell them. But if I have to criticize the world in their hearing, I prefer to do it in specifics, rather than give the idea that I think the world, in general, is a bad place. I don’t think it is, and for all the bad that is in it, I would much rather be in it than out of it. I am in no hurry to leave.

Learn all you can on your own before you spend any money on a school.

A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.

Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that every day. That’s it. What are you working for, posterity? We don’t know if there is any posterity.

One of the more agreeable symmetries in design work is that consistency and laziness often lead you to the same solution. If software developers have a crucial lesson for designers, it is to exploit this situation to the fullest extent possible, then use the saved time to get into bread baking or something.

Learn to draw. If you don’t, you’re gonna live your life getting around that and trying to compensate.

“When I think I’m teaching, I’m probably not,” he said. “When I don’t think I’m teaching, I probably am.”

It’s hard for me to throw anything away without thinking about how it can become part of some work I’m doing. I just stare at something and say: Why isn’t that art? Why couldn’t that be art?

If plants grow and thrive, he should be happy; and if the plants which thrive chance not to be the ones which he planted, they are plants nevertheless, and nature is satisfied with them. We are apt to covet the things which we cannot have; but we are happier when we love the things which grow because they must.

Little children love the dandelions; why may not we? Love the things nearest at hand; and love intensely.

It’s easy to forget that we only ever see facets of other people, never the whole (not even in marriage) — and in those facets what we’re mostly seeing is some aspect of ourselves.

I write nonfiction because I don’t understand life well enough to make things up.

Grant yourself the superpower of making “art” wherever you go, and see how that changes what you perceive. Art is everywhere, if you say so.

He said that unconditional acceptance was “loving someone into existence.”