Jean-Paul Sartre // "'Hell is other people'…is only one side of the coin. The other side, which no one seems to mention, is also 'Heaven is each other.' Hell is separateness, uncommunicability, self-centeredness, lust for power, for riches, for fame. Heaven on the other hand is very simple, and very hard: caring about your fellow beings. And that’s possible on a sustained basis only in collectivity."
David Lynch // "The idea is the whole thing. If you stay true to the idea, it tells you everything you need to know, really. You just keep working to make it look like that idea looked, feel like it felt, sound like it sounded, and be the way it was. And it’s weird, because when you veer off, you sort of know it. You know when you’re doing something that is not correct because it feels incorrect. It says, 'No, no; this isn’t like the idea said it was.' And when you’re getting into it the correct way, it feels correct. It’s an intuition: You feel-think your way through. You start one place, and as you go, it gets more and more finely tuned. But all along it’s the idea talking. At some point, it feels correct to you. And you hope that it feels somewhat correct to others."
Albert Camus // "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
James Baldwin // "Quite unpredictable things happen when the bulk of the population attains what we think of as a high cultural level... This, I think, is because the effort of a Schoenberg or a Picasso…or a William Faulkner or an Albert Camus…has nothing to do, at bottom, with physical comfort, or indeed with comfort of any other kind. But the aim of the people who rise to this high cultural level...is precisely comfort for the body and the mind. The artistic objects by which they are surrounded cannot possibly fulfill their original function of disturbing the peace...which is still the only method by which the mind can be improved...they bear witness instead to the attainment of a certain level of economic stability and a certain thin measure of sophistication. But art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experience: it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one’s aim is to be protected from the second."
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."
Jonas Mekas // "What I do, I take a stand for beauty! All those who lived before me, all the poets, troubadours, all the scientists, all the saints…they did everything so that humanity would become more subtle and more beautiful. So I can not betray them. I try to continue their work. I am with them. I am with you who lived before me. I did everything so that humanity would become more beautiful."
Agnes Varda // "I don’t want to show things, but to give people the desire to see."
Bob Dylan // "Boy, I hurried... I hurried for a long time. I'm sorry I did. All the time you're hurrying, you're not really as aware as you should be. You're trying to make things happen instead of just letting it happen. You follow me?"
Timothy Leary // "Emotions are the lowest form of consciousness... The only state in which we can learn, harmonize, grow, merge, join, understand is the absence of emotion. This is called bliss or ecstasy, attained through centering the emotions... Conscious love is not an emotion; it is serene merging with yourself, with other people, with other forms of energy. Love cannot exist in an emotional state... The great kick of the mystic experience, the exultant, ecstatic hit, is the sudden relief from emotional pressure. Emotions are closely tied to ego games. Check your emotions at the door to paradise."
Marcel Proust // "My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing."
Rainer Maria Rilke // "Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions…one has emotions early enough... For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters…to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars…and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women…who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves…only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them."
Joan Mitchell // "Feeling, existing, living, I think it's all the same, except for quality. Existing is survival; it does not mean necessarily feeling. You can say good morning, good evening. Feeling is something more: it's feeling your existence."