Albert Einstein // "Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens… Therefore it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analysing long-held commonplace concepts and showing the circumstances on which their justification and usefulness depend, and how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. Thus their excessive authority will be broken."
Henri Matisse // "Don’t try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out."
Henry Miller (& Anais Nin) // "When I see you, all I wanted to say vanishes. The time is so precious and words are extraneous… You come and the time slips away in a dream. It is only when you go that I realize completely your presence. And then it is too late. You numb me."
Anais Nin // "I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits."
Carl Jung // "When you are up against a wall, put down roots like a tree, until clarity comes from deeper sources to see over that wall and grow."
Paul Cezanne // "Tell me, do you think I'm going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know."
Thelonious Monk // "I never was a person that thought because some person was doing one thing, and seemed to be making out better, that I should be doing the same thing... I’ve never wished for anybody else’s job. I enjoy what I do and I’m myself all the time. And I’ll continue to be me."
Maurice Sendak // "Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters...I sent him a card and I drew a picture...I wrote, 'Dear Jim: I loved your card.' Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, 'Jim loved your card so much he ate it.' That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it."
Robert Graves // "Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience': They're talking to a single person all the time."
Kurt Vonnegut // "Why me? That’s a very Earthling question to ask...why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? Yes. Well here we are...trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."
David Attenborough // "We often talk of saving the planet, but the truth is that we must do these things to save ourselves."
Susan Sontag // "It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little…have few verbal means. Eloquence…thinking in words…is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech."