Creativity Quote by Agnes Martin

Martin’s advice reads like self-help until you remember who’s speaking: an artist who made a career out of subtraction. The repetition is the tell. “Give up… give up…” isn’t clumsy; it’s a mantra, a studio instruction, the mental equivalent of drawing another faint line across an otherwise empty canvas. She’s not cheering “follow your passion” in a motivational-poster way. She’s describing a discipline: progress as refusal, clarity purchased by boredom you stop consenting to.

The phrasing “acceptable to your mind” is the hinge. It’s not “acceptable to society,” the market, or even your own ego. It’s a private standard, almost ascetic. Martin’s work is often misread as serene minimalism; her life and writing suggest a tougher project: protecting a fragile inner weather system from noise. In that light, “things you do not like” aren’t mere preferences. They’re whatever scrambles the signal - obligations, chatter, fashionable gestures, even certain kinds of ambition. She’s arguing that taste is a survival tool.

There’s subtexted permission here, especially for creative people trained to romanticize suffering. Martin flips the script: discomfort isn’t automatically virtue, and endurance isn’t automatically growth. Progress happens when you stop feeding the parts of your life that feel deadening and start arranging conditions where attention can stay intact. It’s less about indulgence than about alignment - a stark, practical ethics of the mind.