Rabindranath Tagore // "Who are you, reader, reading my poems a hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring... Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of a hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years."
Charlie Chaplin // "The best thing in life is to go ahead with all your plans and your dreams, to embrace life and to live everyday with passion, to lose and still keep the faith and to win while being grateful. All of this because the world belongs to those who dare to go after what they want. And because life is really too short to be insignificant."
Bertrand Russell (message to future generations) // "I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral. The intellectual thing that I should want to say to them is this: When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say. The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple... I should say love is wise, hatred is foolish."
Johnny Cash // "So I simply don’t buy the concept of Generation X as the “lost generation.” I see too many good kids out there, kids who are ready and willing to do the right thing… Their distractions are greater, though. There’s no more simple life with simple choices for the young."
John Steinbeck // "People like you to be something, preferably what they are."
Leonard Cohen // "We don’t want to live a frivolous life, we don’t want to live a superficial life. We want to be serious with each other, with our friends, with our work. That doesn’t necessarily mean gloomy or grim, but seriousness...is something that we are deeply hungry for, to take ourselves seriously and to be able to enjoy the nourishment of seriousness, that gravity, that weight."
Barack Obama (on his parents' meeting) // "She stopped and laughed to herself. 'Did I ever tell you that he was late for our first date? He asked me to meet him in front of the university library at one. When I got there he hadn’t arrived, but I figured I’d give him a few minutes. It was a nice day, so I laid out on one of the benches, and before I knew it I had fallen asleep. Well, an hour later — an hour! — he shows up with a couple of his friends. I woke up and the three of them were standing over me, and I heard your father saying, serious as can be, 'You see, gentlemen. I told you that she was a fine girl, and that she would wait for me.' ... My mother laughed once more, and once again I saw her as the child she had been. Except this time I saw something else: In her smiling, slightly puzzled face, I saw what all children must see at some point if they are to grow up — their parents’ lives revealed to them as separate and apart, reaching out beyond the point of their union or the birth of a child, lives unfurling back to grandparents, great-grandparents, an infinite number of chance meetings, misunderstandings, projected hopes, limited circumstances. My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people in her head, flattered by my father’s attention, confused and alone, trying to break out of the grip of her own parents’ lives. The innocence she carried that day, waiting for my father, had been tinged with misconceptions, her own needs. But it was a guileless need, one without self-consciousness, and perhaps that’s how any love begins, impulses and cloudy images that allow us to break across our solitude, and then, if we’re lucky, are finally transformed into something firmer."
Meryl Streep // "I'm curious about people... I'm interested in what it would be like to be you."
Andy Warhol // "When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can't make them change if they don't want to, just like when they do want to, you can't stop them."
Heath Ledger // "I felt like when I left home that I was on a journey, and I still am."
Alejandro Jodorowsky // "It's so weird to be alive and to be inside a body."
Marina Abramovic // “Our society is in a mess of losing its spiritual centre. The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind.”