Henri Matisse // "Don’t try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out."
Bruce Lee // "Emptiness is the starting point. In order to taste my cup of water you must first empty your cup. My friend, drop all your preconceived and fixed ideas and be neutral. Do you know why this cup is useful? Because it is empty."
Leo Tolstoy // "People usually think that progress consists in the increase of knowledge, in the improvement of life, but that isn't so. Progress consists only in the greater clarification of answers to the basic questions of life. The truth is always accessible to a man...because a man's soul is a divine spark, the truth itself. It's only a matter of removing from this divine spark, everything that obscures it. Progress consists, not in the increase of truth, but in freeing it from its wrappings. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold."
Charles Bukowski // "Understand me...I do not have time for things that have no soul."
Carl Sagan (& Ann Druyan) // "Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together... If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice...is clearly the universe or nothing."
Paolo Roversi // "We all have a sort of mask of expression. You say goodbye, you smile, you are scared. I try to take all these masks away and little by little subtract until you have something pure left. A kind of abandon, a kind of absence. It looks like an absence, but in fact when there is this emptiness I think the interior beauty comes out."
Anna Karina // "Everybody...all the people with talent and genius...there is one way they are all the same: they're very human, and they have this sense of giving to you. It doesn't matter what kind of way they're doing it, as long as it's getting to you...as long as you're on the same road."
William S. Burroughs // "Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape."
Albert Einstein // "Although I am typically a loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those whose strive for truth, beauty and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated."
Joan Didion // "I work every day. Sometimes I don't accomplish anything...but if I don't work every day, I get depressed and get afraid to start again. So I do something every day."
Jack Kerouac // "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."
David Lynch // "I long for a kind of quiet where I can just drift and dream."