Wit & Attitude Quote by May Sarton

Sarton isn’t selling a tidy self-help slogan; she’s sketching a survival method for anyone trying to turn a life into art without being crushed by it. “Conscious creation” frames the day as something made, not endured. That’s a poet’s refusal of autopilot: experience doesn’t automatically cohere into meaning, so you have to compose it. The phrase also smuggles in responsibility. If the day is created, you can’t fully blame the weather, the inbox, or your temperament for what it becomes.

Her pairing of “discipline and order” with “play and pure foolishness” is the real maneuver. She doesn’t romanticize chaos as authenticity, and she doesn’t worship rigor as virtue. “Relieved” is the key verb: order is necessary, but it’s pressure; it needs a release valve. Not “balanced” (a sterile corporate word), but relieved, like unclenching a fist. And she insists on “pure foolishness,” a kind of unproductive, non-monetizable play that modern life constantly tries to launder into “wellness” or “creativity” with outcomes attached.

Context matters: Sarton’s work is steeped in solitude, routine, and the daily negotiations of making poems, keeping a house, living with one’s own mind. For a 20th-century woman artist, “discipline” isn’t just aesthetic; it’s logistical defiance. The subtext is bracingly pragmatic: if you don’t schedule the seriousness, it won’t happen, and if you don’t permit the foolishness, the seriousness curdles into bitterness. The day, she implies, is either crafted on purpose or assembled by default.