Enjoyed quotes.

“...the relationships worth having, demand that we delve ... deeper.
The possibilities that exist between two people ... are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.
When relationships are determined by manipulation, by the need for control, they may possess a dreary, bickering kind of drama, but they cease to be interesting. They are repetitious; the shock of human possibilities has ceased to reverberate through them.
When someone tells me a piece of the truth which has been withheld from me, and which I needed in order to see my life more clearly, it may bring acute pain, but it can also flood me with a cold, sea-sharp wash of relief. Often such truths come by accident, or from strangers.
It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship ... I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you.
It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.
The possibility of life between us.”
Adrienne Rich

"If there were no eternal consciousness in a man,
If at the bottom there were only a wild ferment,
A power that twisting in dark passions produced Everything great or inconsequential;
If an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid Beneath everything,
what would life be but despair?"
Kierkegaard

"To be modern means to understand that there is ultimately only the present moment with all it contains: juxtaposition, contradiction, unexplained phenomena. To understand that the past cannot save nor the future promise; that we can never explain; that all we can hope to do is see. To see as clearly, as objectively, as remorselessly as possible, and to accept what we see without regret or judgment. To understand there there is nothing more to life - nothing at the back of the mind, at the bottom of the pit, at the end of the orgy, at the end of the world. Nothing. Nothing at all. And that out of nothing, if only we can acknowledge it, pure possibility might arise. Something new. Something modern." 


Paul Schmidt

"Drunkenness is temporary suicide: The happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness."
Bertrand Russell

"I think modern art's almost total pre-occupation with subjectivism has led to anarchy and sterility in the arts. The notion that reality exists only in the artist's mind, and that the thing which simpler souls had for so long believed to be reality is only an illusion, was initially an invigorating force, but it eventually led to a lot of highly original, very personal and extremely uninteresting work. In Cocteau's film Orpheé, the poet asks what he should do. 'Astonish me,' he is told. Very little of modern art does that -- certainly not in the sense that a great work of art can make you wonder how its creation was accomplished by a mere mortal. Be that as it may, films, unfortunately, don't have this problem at all. From the start, they have played it as safe as possible, and no one can blame the generally dull state of the movies on too much originality and subjectivism." 

Stanley Kubrick

"The chief enemy of creativity is good taste."
Pablo Picasso

"Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table."
W. H. Auden

“Imagination … That awful power rose from mind’s abyss / Like an unfathered vapour.”
William Wordsworth

"One method Nazis used to control Jews was to present them a series of meaningless choices. Red identity papers were issued to one group, while another received blue. Which will permit my family to survive another selection? Are identity papers with or without photographs safer? Should I declare myself a shoemaker or a clothier? When the line splits, do I step to the left or to the right? In making these choices victims felt the illusion of control over their destinies, and often failed to reject the entire system. Resistance to exploitation was diminished."
Derrick Jensen

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
Aldous Huxley

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
Blaise Pascal

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
Carl Jung

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
Sinclair Lewis

"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names."
John F. Kennedy

"Suburbia is where the developer bull-dozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."
Bill Vaughan

"Hope is the denial of reality."
Margaret Weis

"A common view among voluntary simplicity advocates is that there is a vicious cycle in which the materialistic drive to acquire consumer goods forces people to work long hours and sacrifice personal relationships. Moreover the sacrificing of personal and other relationships for income creates a void that people attempt to fill, paradoxically, by acquiring more consumer goods. This vicious cycle was termed affluenza by de Graff, Wann and Naylor in several PBS programs. Key advocates [...] argue that to live more simply involves working less, wanting less, and spending less. This life-style is easier to maintain when it is reinforced through social interactions of like minded people."
Steven Hackett

“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape.”
Pablo Picasso

"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."
Bertrand Russell