Huston Cummings Smith (May 31, 1919 – December 30, 2016) India never had the notion until our century of art for art’s sake. Art was a spiritual technology, and it is really very miraculous how art makes easy what otherwise would be difficult. Now, what is otherwise difficult? And the answer is to behave decently …
James Baldwin On Oneself
James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) But if one can reach back, reach down — into oneself, into one’s life — and find there some witness, however unexpected or ambivalent, to one’s reality, one will be enabled, though perhaps not very spiritedly, to face another day… What one must be enabled to …
Jane Goodall On Reading
Dame Jane Morris Goodall (April 03, 1934 -) I loved to read in bed, and after I had to put the lights out I would read under the bedclothes with a torch, always hoping my mother would not come in and find out! I used to read curled up in front of the fire on …
Jane Hirshfield On Experience
Jane Hirshfield (February 24, 1953 -) The ability to stay in the moment, to investigate it through my own body and mind, was what I most needed to learn at that point in my life. To stay within my own experience more fearlessly. I think that’s why I needed to practice Zen, rather than go …
Audre Lorde On Living While Dying
Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going …
John Cheever On Art
John Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of …
Teju Cole On Photography
Teju Cole (June 27, 1975 -) Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs. … [Photography] is about retention: not only the ability to make an image directly out of the interaction between …
Virginia Woolf On The Thing Itself
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art… there is no Shakespeare… no Beethoven… no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
Rebecca Solnit On Democracy And Authoritarianism
Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) Democracy is a set of agreements to make decisions together and respect the outcome whether you like them or not. The kind of violence we saw on Capitol Hill (Jan 06, 2021) is authoritarian, a way to try to force other people to submit to the will of the …
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Maria Popova On Dying
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) We die. All of us — atoms to atoms, stardust to stardust, the mountain to the sea — you and I. The dual awareness of our improbable life and our inevitable death is what allows us to animate the interlude with love and beauty, with poems and fairy tales …
Ursula K Le Guin On Suffering
Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018) Suffering is a misunderstanding… It exists… It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You …
Jean Cocteau On Death
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (July 05, 1889 – October 11, 1963) Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
Helen Fisher On Love As Addiction
Helen Fisher (May 31, 1945 -) If the love object breaks off the relationship, the lover experiences signs of drug withdrawal, including protest, crying spells, lethargy, anxiety, insomnia or hyper-somnia, loss of appetite or binge eating, irritability, and loneliness. Lovers, like addicts, also often go to extremes, sometimes doing degrading or physically dangerous things to …
Vita Sackville-West On Love
Vita Sackville-West (March 09, 1892 – June 02, 1962) I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia (Woolf). I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb …
John Uzoma Ekwugha Amaechi On Becoming
John Uzoma Ekwugha Amaechi (November 26, 1970) The most unlikely of people in the most improbable circumstances can be extraordinary. Not that nonsense that ‘If you believe, it will come true’ – that’s bollocks – but if you set a plan, are willing to work, endure extreme mundanity, really embrace some discomfort, I think you …
William Strunk Jr On Writing
William Strunk Jr. (July 1, 1869 – September 26, 1946) Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, …
Andrew Wyeth On Art
Andrew Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) The brain must not interfere. You're painting so constantly that your brain disappears, and your subconscious goes into your fingers, and it just flows. If you think you're painting a good watercolor you can be sure it's lousy. It is important to forget what you are …
Bill Brandt On Photography
Bill Brandt (May 02, 1904 – December 20, 1983) He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time, or the traveller who enters a strange country. Most photographers would feel a sense of embarrassment in admitting publicly that they carried within …
Anne Lamott On The Journey
Anne Lamott (April 10, 1954 -) If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in.
Jose Alberto Gutierrez On Books
Jose Alberto Gutierrez I realized that people were throwing books away in the rubbish. I started to rescue them. There was a lack of them in our neighborhood, so we started to help. The more books we give away, the more come to us. Books transformed me, so I think books are a symbol of …
Chris Van Allsburg On Christmas Magic
Chris Van Allsburg (June 18, 1949 -) At one time most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed, it fell silent for all of them. Even Sarah found one Christmas that she could no longer hear its sweet sound. Though I've grown old, the bell still rings for me as it …
John Keats On Happiness
John Keats (October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821) I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness - I look not for it if it be not in the present hour - nothing startles me beyond the Moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights - or if a sparrow come before my window …
Ralph Ellison On Writing
Ralph Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget …
Jean Cocteau On Poets
Jean Cocteau (July 05, 1889 – October 11, 1963) The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force.
Rainer Maria Rilke On Love
Rainer Maria Rilke (December 04, 1875 – December 29, 1926) For the things whose essential life you want to express, begin by asking, "Are you free? Are you prepared to devote all your love to me? And if the thing sees that you are preoccupied, with even a mere particle of your interest, it shuts …
Seneca On Sorrow
Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD65) Let those people go on weeping and wailing whose self-indulgent minds have been weakened by long prosperity, let them collapse at the threat of the most trivial injuries; but let those who have spent all their years suffering disasters endure the worst afflictions with a brave and resolute staunchness. …
Nadine Gordimer On Writing
Nadine Gordimer (November 20, 1923 – July 13, 2014) All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
Alan Bennett On Reading
Alan Bennett (May 09, 1934 -) The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even …
George Orwell On Truth
George Orwell (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950) In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Sandra Hochman On A Word
Sandra Hochman (1936 -) If only there were a perfect word I could give to you — a world like some artichoke that could sit on the table, dry, and become itself.
Cliff Joseph On The Power Of Art
Cliff Joseph (June 23, 1922 - November 08, 2020) Those who are at the head of the oppressive system know well the power of art and fear it in the hands of the people. That is why power structures throughout man’s history have sought to suppress and control the creative artist. Mr. Joseph’s “Ancestral Affirmation” …
Elie Wiesel On Silence
Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016) I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Jewish Holocaust 1941 — 1945
Amy Tan On Success
Amy Tan (February 19, 1952 -) External success has to do with people who may see me as a model, or an example, or a representative. As much as I may dislike or want to reject that responsibility, this is something that comes with public success. It's important to give others a sense of hope …
