Jacques Brel // "I wish you endless dreams and the furious desire to realize some of them. I wish you to love what must be loved, and to forget what must be forgotten. I wish you passions. I wish you silences. I wish you birdsongs as you wake up and children’s laughter. I wish you to respect the differences of others, because the worth and virtues of each person often remain to be discovered. I wish you to resist the stagnation, the indifference, and the negative values of our time. I wish you at last to never to give up the search, for adventure, life, love. For life is a wonderful adventure and no reasonable person should give it up without a tough fight. I wish you above all to be yourself, proud of being and happy, for happiness is our true destiny."
Anais Nin // "Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."
T.S. Eliot // "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."
Edward Gorey // "All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important... You can describe all the externals of a performance...everything, in fact, but what really constitutes its core. Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is what's left over after you've explained everything else."
James Baldwin // "The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it."
Milton Glaser // "You feel differently towards the world when you make things."
Maya Angelou // "Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure...and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed."
Charles Bukowski // "Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing. To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art... Boxing can be art. Loving can be art. Opening a can of sardines can be an art... Not many have style. Not many can keep style... Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done."
Justin Jones // "No justice, no peace. I believe the roots of it lie in something Martin Luther King stated…that true peace is not merely the absence of tension, but it is the presence of justice. That is what I was saying. That until we act, there will be no peace in our communities."
Charles Bowden // "Imagine the problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more."
Ryuichi Sakamoto // "I used to know things intellectually, but now I feel them."
Henry Miller // "Real awareness comes intermittently, in brief flashes of a second’s duration. The man who can hold it for a minute, relatively speaking, inevitably changes the whole trend of the world. In the span of ten or twenty thousand years a few widely isolated individuals have striven to break the deadlock, shatter the trance, as it were. Their efforts, if we look at the present state of the world superficially, seem to have been ineffectual. And yet the example which their lives afford us points conclusively to one thing…that the real drama of men on earth is concerned with Reality, and not with the creation of civilizations which permit the great mass of men to snore more or less blissfully… Men…know it intermittently, just as they know other things which they conveniently proceed to forget where there is danger of having their sleep disturbed… Man refuses to stay awake because if he did, he would be obliged to become something other than he now is, and the thought of that is apparently too painful for him to endure… If man were to come to grips with his real nature…he would become so exalted, or else so frightened, that he would find it impossible to go to sleep again. To live would be a perpetual challenge to create."
