Leonard Cohen // "You live your life as if it’s real... The evidence accumulates that you’re not running the show. You still have to make choices as if you were running the show, but you make your choices with the intuitive understanding that it’s unfolding as it must... And if you can relax in that...if you can even touch it, or if it asserts itself from time to time, then the invincible defeat is transcended."
Thomas Bernhard // "Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt…an attempt that seems touching even to our intellect…to cope with this world and its revolting aspects… All these pictures…are an expression of man's absolute helplessness in coping with himself and with what surrounds him all his life. That is what all these pictures express, this helplessness which, on the one hand, embarasses the intellect and, on the other hand, bewilders the same intellect and moves it to tears."
Nina Simone // "I had spent many years pursuing excellence...now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important."
Leo Tolstoy // "Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it's only here that the new and the good begins."
Viktor Frankl // "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
Charles Bukowski // "Once again I hear somebody who is going to settle down and do their work, painting or writing or whatever, as soon as they get a better light installed, or as soon as they move to a new city, or as soon as they come back from the trip they have been planning, or as soon as... It's simple: they just don't want to do it, or they can't do it, otherwise they'd feel a burning itch from hell they could not ignore and 'soon' would turn quickly into 'now.'
J. Krishnamurti // "I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view... Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others... Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living. A dead thing has a path to it because it is static, but when you see that the truth is something living, moving, which has no resting place, which is in no temple, mosque or church, which no religion, no teacher, no philosopher, nobody can lead you to...then you will also see that this living thing is what you actually are. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary."
Sade Adu // "Whatever I'm doing, I'm in that moment and I'm doing it. The rest of the world's lost."
Stephen Fry // "Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it…that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing…an actor, a writer…I am a person who does things…I write, I act…and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun."
Clarice Lispector // "When I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright. I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself. When I suddenly see myself in the mirror, I am not startled because I find myself ugly or beautiful... When I haven't looked at myself for some time, I almost forget that I am human."
William S. Burroughs // "The artist observes something invisible to others."
Ernest Hemingway // "Don’t ever kid yourself about loving someone. It is just that most people are not lucky enough ever to have it. What you have...whether it lasts just through today and a part of tomorrow, or whether it lasts for a long life is the most important thing that can happen to a human being. There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow."