Martin Luther King Jr. // "Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love."
David Bowie // "I suspect that dreams are an integral part of existence, with far more use for us than we've made of them... The fine line between the dream state and reality is at times, for me, quite grey."
Hermann Hesse // "Accustom yourself every morning to look for a moment at the sky and suddenly you will be aware of the air around you, the scent of morning freshness that is bestowed on you between sleep and labor. You will find every day that the gable of every house has its own particular look, its own special lighting. Pay it some heed…you will have for the rest of the day a remnant of satisfaction and a touch of coexistence with nature. Gradually and without effort the eye trains itself to transmit many small delights."
Nina Simone // "I had spent many years pursuing excellence...now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important."
John Cassavetes // "The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to... As an artist, I feel that we must try many things...but above all, we must dare to fail. You must have the courage to be bad...to be willing to risk everything...to really express it all."
Jean Cocteau // "If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed."
J. Krishnamurti // "You listen to something, and your mind immediately reacts with its knowledge, its conclusions, its opinions, its past memories. It listens, inquiring for a future understanding. Just observe yourself, how you are listening… Either you are listening with a conclusion, with knowledge, with certain memories, experiences, or you want an answer, and you are impatient. You want to know what it is all about, what life is all about, the extraordinary complexity of life. You are not actually listening at all. You can only listen when the mind is quiet, when the mind doesn't react immediately, when there is an interval between your reaction and what is being said. Then, in that interval there is a quietness, there is a silence in which alone there is a comprehension which is not intellectual understanding. If there is a gap between what is said and your own reaction to what is said, in that interval…if you observe, there comes clarity."
Ram Dass // "When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying, 'You’re too this, or I’m too this.' That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are."
Diane Arbus // "The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way."
Ernest Hemingway // "We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright."
Patti Smith // "Sometimes you're doing really well, then, after three or four years, everything inexplicably crashes like a house of cards and you have to rebuild it. It's not like you get to a point where you're all right for the rest of your life."
Anaïs Nin // "To dwell so much on the disintegration of passion when tested by human reality is merely to assert that death ultimately triumphs over our bodies, but this does not mean that we should refuse to live or love. These philosophers discount the duration of the passion, its euphorias and ecstasies, to observe only its dissolution. If we are unable to make passion a relationship of duration, surviving the destruction and erosions of daily life, it still does not divest passion of its power to transform, transfigure, transmute a human being from a rather limited, petty, fearful creature to a magnificent figure reaching at moments the status of a myth… What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion, but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life, that it is in this way that poetry becomes the greatest truth, by intensification, condensation of experience. While poetry is considered by most as illusion and delusion, it is the only reality, the moment when we are completely alive."
