Leonard Cohen // "Take the word butterfly. To use this word it is not necessary to make the voice weigh less than an ounce or equip it with small dusty wings. It is not necessary to invent a sunny day or a field of daffodils. It is not necessary to be in love, or to be in love with butterflies. The word butterfly is not a real butterfly… Do not make so much of the word. Are you trying to suggest that you love butterflies more perfectly than anyone else, or really understand their nature? The word butterfly is merely data… Do not act out words. Never act out words. Never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. Never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you talk about death… What is the expression which the age demands? The age demands no expression whatever… There is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time. Do not even try. You will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have felt things deeply… Everyone knows you are eating well and are even being paid to stand up there… This should make you very quiet. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside… You have nothing to teach them. You are not more beautiful than they are. You are not wiser… You are among the people. Then be modest… You are students of discipline. Do not act out the words. The words die when you act them out, they wither, and we are left with nothing but your ambition. Speak the words with the exact precision with which you would check out a laundry list. Do not become emotional about the lace blouse… The socks are not there to remind you of strange and distant voyages. It is just your laundry. It is just your clothes… Just wear them… Think of the words as science, not as art. They are a report... Do not work the audience for gasps and sighs. If you are worthy of gasps and sighs it will not be from your appreciation of the event but from theirs. It will be in the statistics and not the trembling of the voice or the cutting of the air with your hands. It will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence. Avoid the flourish. Do not be afraid to be weak."
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 // "In a meadow full of flowers you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry of life."
Mads Mikkelsen // "My approach to what I do in my job…and it might even be the approach to my life…is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference…because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something…a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important."
David Lynch // "No matter what the weather is, I wish for all of you blue skies and golden sunshine internally all along the way."
Albert Camus // "The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning."
River Phoenix // "It’s not about a career. It’s about believing in something, it’s about prosperity. And it’s about caring and empathizing and wanting to create the best, the most true to life, the most real."
Sofia Coppola // "I wanted to do an intimate story between…two characters and the idea that you can meet someone and spend two days with them and that can be just as important as someone you’ve known for years."
Martin Luther King Jr. // "One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of the status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change."
Björk // "We go through changes roughly every three years, sometimes seven, where our colour palette changes and how we feel changes…the aroma or the textures…the lightness or darkness around us shifts."
Robert Frank // "When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice."
Marcel Marceau // "I don't want our youth to become anti-romantic. We have to make room for the soul."
Colin Wilson // "Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it."
Carrie Mae Weems // "I don’t always know what I’m doing. I’m often lost and struggling through a process and a set of ideas and emotions that I don’t always understand. Sometimes it takes me years to really understand what I’ve done… That’s why I think it’s so important to really sort of get out of the way of the work… I simply know that I need to make something…I need to realize something, grapple with something, and I do that…allowing the work to be what it is…allowing the meaning to emerge as it emerges. And maybe five years from now I’ll see something in the work that I really didn’t know that I was after."
Henry Miller // "What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin...to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it."
Leonard Cohen // "The older you get...the deeper the love you need."
Joan Didion // "We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give...we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us... To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves...there lies the great singular power of self-respect."
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."
Sylvia Plath // "What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world. It is that synthesizing spirit, that 'shaping' force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire... We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward."
James Baldwin // "No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time."
David Hockney // "I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money. I’m greedy for an exciting life."
Leonard Cohen // "May you be surrounded by friends and family, and if this is not your lot, may the blessings find you in your solitude."
Henry Miller // "To make living itself an art, that is the goal."
Nick Cave // "Although I am not an atheist myself, I have a lot of time for their position, because I do struggle with the notion of God’s existence to a certain extent. Atheists, though, fall decisively on one side of the dividing line, whereas I have moved back and forth across that line over the years... Many atheists are well informed on religion and hold a view on the significance of the nature of the theological struggle, and so I feel closer to them than I do to the spiritually complacent, the religiously dogmatic or those who are simply indifferent to these matters... But in regard to your dilemma…I can’t think of an act more generous than an atheist at prayer, who temporarily puts aside their disbelief in a god in order to bring comfort to a friend. Loosening your position for a moment, and doing something difficult because it has been asked of you by someone you care for, demonstrates a confidence in your beliefs, and shows that they are not so prideful or absolutist that they manifest into a smallness of being. Of course, to some this act will seem intellectually dishonest, a sham and a lie, but to others it will appear as the purest kindness, where heart eclipses mind, a true and complex gesture of what it means to love somebody. We show that in times of need we can do whatever is required of us, with a magnanimous heart, bending to the will of those we love. Understandably, it will be difficult for you to pray, but that is the very reason to do it. What is true friendship if we are not tested at times, if we are not prepared to soften our cherished ideals as an act of fidelity and commitment to those we love. In the end, this act of friendship may be the most eloquent prayer of all."
