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."
Frida Kahlo // "Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away."
Aldous Huxley // "It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly... Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them...throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you...trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly...on tiptoes and no luggage...completely unencumbered."
Erich Fromm // "Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole… If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is a proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the loved person. Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who instead of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it."
Henry Miller // "The idea is, you know, you live from moment to moment...this moment decides the next step. You shouldn’t be five steps ahead, only the very next one. And if you can keep to that, you’re always alright. You see, but people are thinking too far ahead...you know what I mean? Think only what’s right there. Do only what’s right under your nose to do. You know? It’s such a simple thing and people can’t do it, you know."
Maggie Smith // "There are times when I’m not even sure I have a real life… It’s only on the stage that I feel really alive. For a certain length of time I have to become a person whom I totally believe in. I would like to be somebody who is very beautiful."
Andy Warhol // "Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, ‘So what.’ ‘My mother didn’t love me.’ So what... ‘I’m a success but I’m still alone.’ So what. I don’t know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget."
Jean-Luc Godard // "I’m very solitary, that’s all… I can’t dismiss it. Inside, I’m very much in communication with a lot of people and things who absolutely don’t know I’m in communication with them."
Kurt Vonnegut // "Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow... The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don’t show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward."
Miles Davis // "Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself."
Gilles Deleuze // "The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say... What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing...the thing that might be worth saying."
E.B. White // "If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. That makes it hard to plan the day."