James Baldwin // "If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe. The forces thus released in the people can never be held in check, but run their devouring course, destroying the very foundations which it was imagined they would save… We are unbelievably ignorant concerning what goes on in our country…to say nothing of what goes on in the rest of the world…and appear to have become too timid to question what we are told. Our failure to trust one another deeply enough to be able to talk to one another has become so great that people with these questions in their hearts do not speak them; our opulence is so pervasive that people who are afraid to lose whatever they think they have persuade themselves of the truth of a lie, and help disseminate it; and God help the innocent here, that man or woman who simply wants to love, and be loved. Unless this would-be lover is able to replace his or her backbone with a steel rod, he or she is doomed... Wherever love is found, it unfailingly makes itself felt in the individual, the personal authority of the individual. Judged by this standard, we are a loveless nation. The best that can be said is that some of us are struggling. And what we are struggling against is that death in the heart which leads not only to the shedding of blood, but which reduces human beings to corpses while they live."
Sophia Loren // "When I’m walking along in the street, I always feel that around the corner, there is something wonderful waiting for me. That’s my attitude."
Hayao Miyazaki // "When you die, you can’t see sunsets."
Ernest Hemingway // "The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed."
Björk // "The more digital we have, the more naked skin and rawness we will want."
Jack Kerouac // "Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running...that’s the way to live."
John Burroughs // "To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter...to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring…these are some of the rewards of the simple life."
Franz Kafka // "I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep…and say: ‘Come with me...we are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.’ Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much."
David Lynch // "I’m just, you know, kind of happy in the doing of things. Even just having a great cup of coffee is happiness. Getting an idea, or realizing an idea. Working on a painting…working on a piece of sculpture, working on a film. One thing I noticed is that many of us, we do what we call work for a goal. For a result. And in the doing, it’s not that much happiness. And yet that’s our life going by. If you’re transcending every day, building up that happiness, it eventually comes to: it doesn’t matter what your work is. You just get happy in the work. You get happy in the little things and the big things. And if the result isn’t what you dreamed of, it doesn’t kill you, if you enjoyed the doing of it. It’s important that we enjoy the doing of our life."
Drew Barrymore // "Every morning I stay in bed for ten minutes to ponder my place in the universe; then I wash my face."
Virginia Woolf // "Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent."
Pepe Mujica // "From a humanist perspective I have a lot of faith. I love mankind so I can’t just swallow the consequences of the path that this civilization is following. The way we’re going you get the impression we’re heading for a catastrophe. Our civilization is more and more globalized, countries are more and more interdependent. We’re sailing through the universe on a ship and we’re responsible for the existence of that ship but we’re eating away at it on all sides. We’re doing everything we can contrary to life. But we have the tools. We don’t have to return to caves or to stagnation but we have to take better advantage of our resources and make a habitable world that is less selfish. We have the know-how and the resources but we have no direction. We’re facing horrifying problems but the leading countries can’t orchestrate effective leadership and make any impact on them. Instead we dedicate ourselves to useless power struggles and fail to solve the problems humanity faces… Knowledge and possibility are infinite because the world’s energy is infinite. It’s infinite, it’s possible. Mankind can reach successively higher musical keys. But for that, humanity will have to embrace reason with an understanding of chaos. And globally, as a species, can we do that? We can, if we are able to govern ourselves."
