Claude Monet // "I must have flowers, always, and always."
Jiddu Krishnamurti // "You cannot reconcile creativeness with technical achievement. You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative; you may play the piano most brilliantly, and not be a musician. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter… We have technique…how to put up a house, how to build a bridge…how to educate our children through a system…we have learned all these techniques, but our hearts and minds are empty... Creativeness is not found through technique. If you have something to say, you create your own style; but when you have nothing to say, even if you have a beautiful style, what you write is only the traditional routine, a repetition in new words of the same old thing… So, having lost the song, we pursue the singer. We learn from the singer the technique of song, but there is no song; and I say the song is essential, the joy of singing is essential. When the joy is there, the technique can be built up from nothing; you will invent your own technique, you won't have to study elocution or style. When you have, you see, and the very seeing of beauty is an art."
Albert Einstein // "Although I am typically a loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated."
Ruth Bernhard // "If you are not willing to see more than what is visible, you won't see anything."
Henry Miller // "Some day I am going to own a few feet of earth somewhere and put a house over it. Just one big room will do, with a stove and a basin of water, a huge desk, a bookcase and an easel. Then life can go rolling by, and what floats in through my door will be sufficient for me."
Hermann Hesse // "My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves."
Saul Steinberg // "I think it is very important for people to run away...from home, from the mainstream, from their family, from the culture, from the society that produced them...because the moment I have to learn something new, like new habits, new languages, I myself have something like a rebirth. I reduce myself to the lowest denominator and this is very healthy for an artist. To start all over again."
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."
George Harrison // "I fell in love, not with anything or anybody in particular but with everything."
Witold Gombrowicz // "To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence... I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage."
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."
James Baldwin // "I’m aware, you know, that I and the people I love may perish in the morning. I know that. But there’s light on our faces now."