David Lynch // "I’m just, you know, kind of happy in the doing of things. Even just having a great cup of coffee is happiness. Getting an idea, or realizing an idea. Working on a painting…working on a piece of sculpture, working on a film. One thing I noticed is that many of us, we do what we call work for a goal. For a result. And in the doing, it’s not that much happiness. And yet that’s our life going by. If you’re transcending every day, building up that happiness, it eventually comes to: it doesn’t matter what your work is. You just get happy in the work. You get happy in the little things and the big things. And if the result isn’t what you dreamed of, it doesn’t kill you, if you enjoyed the doing of it. It’s important that we enjoy the doing of our life."
Drew Barrymore // "Every morning I stay in bed for ten minutes to ponder my place in the universe; then I wash my face."
Virginia Woolf // "Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent."
Pepe Mujica // "From a humanist perspective I have a lot of faith. I love mankind so I can’t just swallow the consequences of the path that this civilization is following. The way we’re going you get the impression we’re heading for a catastrophe. Our civilization is more and more globalized, countries are more and more interdependent. We’re sailing through the universe on a ship and we’re responsible for the existence of that ship but we’re eating away at it on all sides. We’re doing everything we can contrary to life. But we have the tools. We don’t have to return to caves or to stagnation but we have to take better advantage of our resources and make a habitable world that is less selfish. We have the know-how and the resources but we have no direction. We’re facing horrifying problems but the leading countries can’t orchestrate effective leadership and make any impact on them. Instead we dedicate ourselves to useless power struggles and fail to solve the problems humanity faces… Knowledge and possibility are infinite because the world’s energy is infinite. It’s infinite, it’s possible. Mankind can reach successively higher musical keys. But for that, humanity will have to embrace reason with an understanding of chaos. And globally, as a species, can we do that? We can, if we are able to govern ourselves."
Claude Monet // "The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute."
Nikola Tesla // "Instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have…certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction or any other willful effort of the brain is futile."
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."
Nikos Kazantzakis // "Once, I saw a bee drown in honey, and I understood."
Jeff Bridges // "The habitual tendency when things get tough is that we protect ourselves, we get hard, we get rigid. But...that’s the time to soften and see how we might play or dance with the situation."
Charles Bukowski // "Your life is your life. Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. Be on the watch. There are ways out. There is light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness. Be on the watch. The gods will offer you chances. Know them. Take them. You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. And the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. Your life is your life. Know it while you have it. You are marvelous. The gods wait to delight in you."
Albert Camus // "My chief occupation, despite appearances, has always been love."
Björk // "I feel in this time...it is a necessity to have a plan, a manifesto, an alternative. It’s a question of life and death for our species...after tragedies one has to invent a new world, knit it or embroider, make it up. It’s not gonna be given to you because you deserve it, it doesn’t work that way. You have to imagine something that doesn’t exist and dig a cave into the future and demand space. It’s a territorial hope affair...in the future it will become your reality."
