Spontaneity Quotes (55 Quotes)

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  “Why not seize the pleasure at once? -- How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!”

  Jane Austen

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  “Plans are invitation to disappointment.”

  Derek Landy

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  “We can’t jump off bridges anymore because our iPhones will get ruined. We can’t take skinny dips in the ocean because there’s no service on the beach and adventures aren’t real unless they’re on Instagram. Technology has doomed the spontaneity of adventure and we’re helping destroy it every time we Google, check-in, and hashtag.”

  Jeremy Glass

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  “I guess sometimes the greatest memories are made in the most unlikely of places, further proof that spontaneity is more rewarding than a meticulously planned life.”

  J.A. Redmerski

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  “Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, its unplanned, it's full of suprises.”

  Erma Bombeck

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  “To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.”

  Bertrand Russell

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  “Love can flourish only as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought of duty. To say that it is your duty to love so-and-so is the surest way to cause you to hate him of her.”

  Bertrand Russell

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  “Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else - above all, a travel bureau - arrange everything before-hand?”

  Richard Aldington

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• “Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security.”

  Tom Stoppard

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  “I said, but I have to go, there are so many places calling my name.”

  Nikki Rowe

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  “Say yes and you'll figure it out afterwards.”

  Tina Fey

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  “Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art”

  Oscar Wilde

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  “Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice--perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again--and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court. . . . spontaneity isn't random.”

  Malcolm Gladwell

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  “The erotic state – again, a mixture of concentration and spontaneity – is a hypnoidal state, probably the most powerful kind that we are capable of experiencing, and it is in this condition that unexpected regions of the self are revealed, as the majority of people know from experience.”

  Peter Redgrove

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  “The charm of your society, my Sparrow, lies in not knowing what you will say next – though one rapidly learns to expect the worst!”

  Georgette Heyer

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• “Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them."
  
  [Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking (The Creativity Post, December 6, 2011)]”

  Michael Michalko

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  “You can devise all the plans in the world, but if you don’t welcome spontaneity; you will just disappoint yourself.”

  Abigail Biddinger

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  “There was something horribly depressing, she felt, about watching the weather report. That life could be planned like the perfect summer picnic drained it of spontaneity.”

  Galt Niederhoffer

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  “In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.”

  Malcolm Gladwell

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  “There are times when thinking about something is the worst possible policy.”

  John Christopher

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  “Part of the problem about authenticity is that virtues aren't the only things that are habit forming: the more someone behaves in a way that is damaging to self or to others, the more "natural" it will both seem and actually be. Spontaneity, left to itself, can begin by excusing bad behavior and end by congratulating vice.”

  N.T. Wright

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• “But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a one-at-a-time order of thought. Yet the concrete evidence of such an intelligence is right to hand in our own thoughtlessly ordered bodies. For the Tao does not 'know' how it produces the universe just as we do not 'know' how we construct our brains.”

  Alan Watts

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  “to have to combat one’s instincts—that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one.”

  Friedrich Nietzsche

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  “If you were a bird, and lived on high,
  You'd lean on the wind when the wind came by,
  You'd say to the wind when it took you away:
  "That's where I wanted to go today!”

  A.A. Milne

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  “The first bout of warm spring rain caused normally respectable women to pull off their stockings and run through muddy puddles alongside their children.”

  Leslye Walton

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