Martha Graham // "There is a vitality, a life force, an energy...that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist... The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open."
Jim Morrison // "That's what real love amounts to...letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending, performing. You get to love your pretence...people get so used to their image, they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And if you try to remind them, they hate you for it, they feel like you're trying to steal their most precious possession."
Anthony Bourdain // "Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind."
Nelson Mandela // "There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered."
Andrei Tarkovsky // "Weakness is a great thing...strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being...what has hardened will never win."
Aurora // "It can be really hard to be a human...and if you ever feel like you’re not doing a good enough job as a human, then know that, in a day, our only mission could be just not to die...and then you are officially a successful human. And sometimes I think that’s really nice to think about because it gives me less pressure to do anything more in a day, because as long as I end up in my bed alive, I’ve done a good job."
Leonard Cohen // "We don’t want to live a frivolous life, we don’t want to live a superficial life. We want to be serious with each other, with our friends, with our work. That doesn’t necessarily mean gloomy or grim, but seriousness...is something that we are deeply hungry for, to take ourselves seriously and to be able to enjoy the nourishment of seriousness, that gravity, that weight."
James Baldwin (& Nina Simone) // "In order to have a conversation with someone, you must reveal yourself."
Hayao Miyazaki // "In my grandparents' time, it was believed that spirits existed everywhere...in trees, rivers, insects, wells, anything... I like the idea that we should all treasure everything because spirits might exist there, and we should treasure everything because there is a kind of life to everything."
Buckminster Fuller // "We must do away with the...notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery...so we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
Patti Smith // "I believe that we, this planet, hasn't seen its golden age. Everybody says it's finished...art's finished, rock and roll is dead...fuck that! This is my chance in the world. I didn't live back there in Mesopotamia. I wasn't there in the Garden of Eden. I wasn't there with Emperor Han. I'm here right now and I want now to be the golden age... If only every generation would realize that the time for greatness is right now when they're alive...the time to flower is now."
Albert Einstein // "Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder..."