Martin Luther King Jr. // "We’ve left a lot of precious values behind...and if we are to go forward, if we are to make this a better world in which to live, we’ve got to go back... The first principle of value that we need to rediscover is this...that all reality hinges on moral foundations. In other words, that this is a moral universe, and that there are moral laws of the universe, just as abiding as the physical laws. I’m not so sure we all believe that. We never doubt that there are physical laws of the universe that we must obey. We never doubt that. And so we just don’t jump out of airplanes or jump off of high buildings...because we unconsciously know that there is a final law of gravitation, and if you disobey it you’ll suffer the consequences... Even if we don’t know it in its Newtonian formulation, we know it intuitively... But I’m not so sure if we know that there are moral laws, just as abiding as the physical law. I’m not so sure about that. I’m not so sure we really believe that there is a law of love in this universe, and that if you disobey it you’ll suffer the consequences... Now, at least two things convince me that we don’t believe that, that we have strayed away from the principle that this is a moral universe. The first thing is that we have adopted in the modern world a sort of a relativistic ethic... Most people can’t stand up for their convictions, because the majority of people might not be doing it... See, everybody’s not doing it, so it must be wrong. And, since everybody is doing it, it must be right... The other thing is that we have adopted a sort of a pragmatic test for right and wrong...whatever works is right. If it works, it’s all right... If you don’t get caught, it’s right. That’s the attitude, isn’t it? Just get by... My friends, that attitude is destroying the soul of our culture. It’s destroying our nation... We’ve got to know the simple disciplines, of being honest and loving and just with all humanity. If we don’t learn it, we will destroy ourselves, by the misuse of our own powers. This universe hinges on moral foundation."
Muhammad Ali // "When we devote all of our actions to a spiritual goal, everything that we do becomes a prayer."
Thelonious Monk // "Don't play everything (or every time); let some things go by... What you don't play can be more important than what you do."
Hedy Lamarr // "I’ll read you something pretty: People are unreasonable, illogical and self centered; love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, alternative motives; do good anyway. The biggest people with the biggest ideas can be shut down by the smallest people with the smallest minds; think big anyway. What you spend years building maybe destroyed overnight; build anyway. Give the world the best you have and you’ll be kicked into defeat; give the world the best you’ve got anyway."
T.S. Eliot // "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."
Philippe Petit // "My journey has always been the balance between chaos and order."
Christopher Doyle // "Art is what artists make. So the process is to become an artist, it’s not to make art. And that’s the journey as a person...to get to a point where you are at ease with yourself, where you are open to all the possibilities, and then it will be re-channeled through you as an artist... So the process is actually the process of you. The process is working on yourself."
Benicio del Toro // "What do I see when I look in the mirror? Most of the time when I look in the mirror it’s to see which way my hair is going, because it does anything it wants. After that, I make eye contact with me...just to make sure it’s me in there. Yeah. Just to make sure it’s me."
Anais Nin // "We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."
Wong Kar-wai // "I always say, the first people who visit a place, we call them adventurers...after that, they are all tourists, because they know exactly what they’re going to get. I don’t want to be a tourist. I want to be someone who discovers something."
Ernest Hemingway // "We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master."
David Bowie // "I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying... I’m talking about the actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything that we can really envisage at the moment. Where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico, it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about... The idea that the piece of work is not finished until the audience come to it and add their own interpretation and what the piece of art is about is the grey space in the middle. That grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about."
