Henry Miller // "Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths."
Katherine Mansfield // "The mind I love must have wild places."
Oliver Sacks // "To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom...or, at least, the illusion of freedom...to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives."
Helen Mirren // "I don't believe that if you do good, good things will happen... Sometimes bad things happen to very good people and sometimes good things happen to bad people. But at least if you try to do good things, then you're spending your time doing something worthwhile."
Tove Jansson // "It is simply this: do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent…lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die. It's as simple as that."
Carl Sagan // "Present global culture is a kind of arrogant newcomer. It arrives on the planetary stage following four and a half billion years of other acts, and after looking about for a few thousand years declares itself in possession of eternal truths. But in a world that is changing as fast as ours, this is a prescription for disaster. No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them."
Ingmar Bergman // "Perhaps we are the same person. Perhaps we have no limits; perhaps we flow into each other, stream through each other, boundlessly and magnificently."
John Muir // "The body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one's flesh like radiant heat."
Miles Davis // "Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself."
Leonor Fini // "I always imagined that I would have a life very different than the one imagined for me, but I understood from a very early age that I would have to revolt in order to make that life."
Joseph Campbell // "If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's."
Nick Cave // "The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love...just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil."