TWITTER'S SCRAPES QUOTES | 2021 - 2022
I glean and retrieve quotes, aphorisms and short sentences from artists, writers and philosophers appearing daily on my Twitter Home Page. They are a bit like in Ella Maillart's Snippets of Wisdom, who said in her beautiful book: "Europe is still going in the wrong direction. Our civilization based on money is worthless. It's not money that counts, it's the spirit. Money kills the spirit." These are fragments of thoughts, little fireflies lighting our drifting humanity and warming our hearts, as in that simple phrase uttered by Ichi: "Anyone deprived of warmth ends up freezing to death." Excerpt from the film: Ichi, The Samurai Woman by Fumihiko Sori.
"To do what is useful, to say what is courageous, to look at what is beautiful: that is enough to fill a man's life." Thomas Stearns Eliot
"The Whole exists before the parts [...] the inner life exists before the states of consciousness." Bergson
"Anything that degrades culture shortens the paths that lead to servitude." Albert Camus
"If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even if you can't get together with that person." Haruki Murakami
"One should not encroach on the future by asking before time what can only come with time." Arthur Schopenhauer
"We have arrived at a moment in history when we must urgently redefine the meaning of civilization." Hayao Miyazaki
"We are, this day, closer to the sinister than the tocsin itself, that is why it is high time to compose ourselves a health of the misfortune. Even if it has the appearance of the arrogance of a miracle." Heureuse la magie, René Char
"When we say there is no joy, we lose confidence, we must not lose confidence. We must remember that confidence is already joy. The hope that it will be just now, the hope that it will be tomorrow, that it will happen, that it is here..." Jean Giono
"I ask you, now, if it is well just, the law which orders to the one who has nothing, to respect the one who has everything." La philosophie dans le boudoir, Marquis de Sade
"The sublime, for me today, is in the faces more than in the works.... Art is only a way to see." Alberto Giacometti
"Our planet is girded by a single global civilization. It is certain that it is so for the first time in the history of the human race. It conceals another primacy: it would be, regardless of the billions of religious people, the first atheistic civilization. Corruption flourishes. The gulf between rich and poor is deepening. While some are starving, others consider wastefulness a habit, even a social duty." Václav Havel
"Eternity is the sea mixed with the sun." Arthur Rimbaud
"You never paint what you see or think you see. You paint with a thousand vibrations the blow that has struck you: how can you be struck and not cry out in anger?" Nicolas de Staël
"What progress inexorably asks of men and continents is to renounce their strangeness, to break with mystery. [...] The human species had entered into conflict with the space, the earth, the very air it takes to live." Les racines du ciel, Romain Gary
"The highest, most decisive experience is to be alone with one's own self. You must be alone to find out what supports you, when you find that you can not support yourself. Only this experience can give you an indestructible foundation." C.G. Jung
"There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration..." The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt
"There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: one day, the black will swallow the red." Mark Rothko
"If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens." Andrei Tarkovsky
"My work, my life, is poetry, it is a dream. This dream I see today without illusions. Perhaps this is what old age is all about." Pier Paolo Pasolini
"Her soul had the same innocent graces as her body; the sweetness of his feelings was infinite; there was nothing but suave and a little dreamy in her mind: it seemed as if her heart, her thought and hier voice sighed as if in concert." Chateaubriand
"Beside the great currents of this world, there are still men anchored in the immobile lands. They are generally unknown men who keep away from all the crossroads of notoriety and modern culture." Julius Evola
"To succeed was not to obtain something for oneself; success had to concern everyone or it was not success." History of a Youth, Elias Canetti
"In what is not essential, they see the essential; in the essential, they see the non-essential. Those who remain in the field of false ideas, never arrive at the essential." Buddha
"Like God, the artist must remain above his work, indifferent, picking his nails." James Joyce
"No, no more verse here. But if your eyes love the most enchanting thing in poetry, in the water of this pool contemplate yourself; the verses have no image equal to your beauty." À une jeune Arabe, Alphonse de Lamartine
"In picking up the shards of time, one does not make eternity." Pensées sous les nuages, Philippe Jaccottet
"For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath." Alice Miller
"I don't see why people expect a work of art to mean something when they accept that their own lives mean nothing."
"Every viewer will get a different thing. That’s the thing about painting, photography, cinema." David Lynch
"Those who learn nothing from the unpleasant facts of their lives, force the cosmic consciousness to reproduce them as many times as necessary, to learn what the drama of what happened teaches. That which you deny subjugates you. What you accept transforms you." C. G. Jung
"To paint means to think with one's brush." Paul Cézanne
"Imagination is our first privilege. Inexplicable as the chance that provokes it. All my life I have tried to accept without trying to understand the compulsive images that presented themselves to me." Luis Buñuel
"Something in her was violently sensual, alive, earthy..." Anaïs Nin
"If all life inevitably goes to its end, we must during ours, color it with our colors of love and hope." Marc Chagall
"Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value." Albert Einstein
"It takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost all cases, we wear out our lives earning money, when we should, through money, earn our time." Albert Camus
"I place a blank piece of paper on the table and I wait for the words, attracted by the light, to come and take hold of it." Christian Bobin
"Your body itself is a temple, Install Bhagwan Shiva in your Soul, and no one will able to take it away that from you!" Hindu proverb
"Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach." Roberto Bolaño
"When I exhibit a painting, I would like it to say, Here I am; here is my presence, my feeling, myself. Here I stand, relentless, proud, alive, naked, fearless." Clifford Still
"I've found, too, that the ancient intellectual traditions are not merely about belief, as some would say. Belief is not a strong enough word. They are more than that: They are part of lived experience, the on-going experience of people rooted in centuries-old knowledge." L. Hogan
"No one can take away your freedom of thought. You can be advised, enlightened by others, but never let anyone think for you." Baruch Spinoza
"Books are concentrated time [...] Every book - like, for that matter, every artistic monument, a painting or a temple - represents a large flow of time from which the author has managed to tear himself away." Les Hooligans, Mircea Eliade
"In everyone's life, there is no day without significance." Alexander Woollcott
"Everyone has his life and must conduct it as a work of art." L'extase matérielle, J.M.G. Le Clézio
"Capitalism creates a state of widespread insomnia" "because it resists all attempts at exploitation, sleep is the major obstacle to the full realization of capitalism." [...] "Now, in the twenty-first century, sleep maintains a more troubling relationship to the future and remains, in many ways, a border state between the social and the natural as well as a cyclical presence in the world essential to life and therefore incompatible with capitalism." Jonathan Crary, France-Inter on January 28, 2021 (One could say more or less the same thing about sexuality!)
"Taste is the disgust of other people's taste. To make people talk about their tastes, you have to make them talk about what disgusts them." Pierre Bourdieu
"If I had to live my life over again. I would like to make even more mistakes. I would go pick more daisies. I would go climb more mountains. I would swim in more rivers..." Jorge Luis Borges
"I want to express my feelings rather then illustrate them." Jackson Pollock
"Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish [...] Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it." Hermann Hesse
"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power." Oscar Wilde
"Everyone seriously involved in science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifested in the laws of the universe." Albert Einstein
"Beings who truly love each other are not limited by space or time. They are bound by the soul, a bond far more intimate, more inseparable than that of the body." François Cheng
"Move through space with minimum waste and maximum joy." Sade Adu
"The day will come when people like me will look at the killing of animals as they look today at the killing of human beings." Léonardo da Vinci
"You rise each morning to a new day, a new world, which has to be created from scratch. Each day is a brilliant improvisation with full orchestra: the light on the sea, the foliage, the stabbing cypresses, the silver spindrift olives." Corfu, Lawrence Durrell
"Oh, how I love solitude! How these places sacred to the night, Far from the world and noise, Pleasing to my anxiety!" Madame de Sévigné
"Everything changes! But it is good to have been a photographer to witness many pretty things that will disappear." Sabine Weiss, photographer, L'heure bleue, France Inter, February 4, 2021
"Don't think that beings who bite life with so much fire in their hearts go away without leaving a mark." Nicolas de Staël
"Staël left, without a step in the snow Knowing himself on the ground of the sea, Then in the stuffing of the path." Riche de larmes, René Char
"It may rain and storm, that's not what matters, often a little joy may seize you on a rainy day and prompt you to retire to the sidelines with your happiness." Pan, Knut Hamsun
"I was obeying an irresistible urge to represent a deep spirituality." Emil Nolde
"Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing." William S. Burroughs
"I would have liked, before I kissed her, to be able to fill her again with the mystery she had for me on the beach, before I knew her, to find in her the country where she had lived before." Marcel Proust
"In life, one must avoid three geometric figures: vicious circles, love triangles and minds that are too square." Mario Benedetti
"Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die." François Truffaut
"I think we are the result of what we have read, seen, experienced. I don't think artists are born out of the void. I am a small stone in a great edifice, I depend on each element of the edifice, next to it, above it, below it..."
"I feel that in Persona (1966) & later in Cries & Whispers (1972)- I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover." Ingmar Bergman
"I had a sleeping bag, fifteen days of provisions on my backpack and I said to myself: I must go and see the beauty of the world, before waiting to know why I live."
"What was fundamental was to understand why and how Europe had similarly gone off the rails to make a crazy civilization that kills each other every 20 or 30 years and then I said to myself, by going to Central Asia, as we lived 2,000 years ago, maybe I would understand what we have done wrong." Ella Maillart
"Consistent kindness can accomplish much. As the sun melts ice, kindness evaporates misunderstanding, distrust, and hostility." Albert Schweitzer
"Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world." Elon Musk
"Trust every chapter of your life because he is the author." Hindu proverb
"The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively." Bob Marley
"There is no vaccine for stupidity." Albert Einstein
"Unite. Practice mutual aid. This is the surest way to give each and every one the greatest security, the best guarantee of existence and of physical, intellectual and moral progress." Pierre Kropotkin
"On a day's work with Buñuel, if you don't laugh at least three times, the day is lost. One must not take oneself seriously."
"Time is like the wind. The wind we don't see: we see the branches it stirs, the dust it raises. But the wind itself, nobody has seen it." Jean-Claude Carrière
"On earth there is no death. All are immortal. All is immortal. No need To be afraid of death at seventeen Nor yet at seventy." Arseniy Tarkovsky
"I belong to an unhappy generation, straddling two worlds and uncomfortable in both." Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
"There are moments when I give up on everything; for no reason simply because fatigue drags me to the bottom of the mists of the past. And my sun hides and my shadow expands." Le Phénix, Paul Éluard
"All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." Chief Seattle
"What we seek is the forbidden fruit. Without it, Paradise is not paradise for us." Alexander Pushkin
"Only through Art can we get out of ourselves, know what another sees of this universe that is not the same as ours, and whose landscapes would have remained as unknown to us as those that may exist in the moon."
"Our wisdom begins where the author's ends, and we would like him to give us answers, when all he can do is give us desires." Sur la lecture, Marcel Proust
"Achilles Tatius in his novel Leucippé and Clitophon states in a very crude way that the union of the eyes is more embracing than coitus: this is the erotic definition of fascination." Vie secrète, Pascal Quignard
"If you wish to lift your eyes above and fix them on your natural abode and your eternal homeland, give no sway over you to the speeches of the vulgar; raise your vows above human rewards." Dream of Scipio, On the Republic, Cicero
"How often does not the Wise Man, in the time when all Nature seems asleep, and when a deep silence favors the inclination for study, revive his mind?"
"As mankind perfects itself, man degrades himself; when all will be but an economic combination of well-counterbalanced interests, of what use will virtue be? When nature is so enslaved that it has lost its original forms, where will plasticity be?" Flaubert
"A mother, you understand, she is Humanity." Albert Camus
"One don't solve a problem with the ways of thinking that created it." Einstein
"Movies have hearts. Boum! Boum! Boum! Have mind! ckcktck…! Have power! N'est-ce pas! Have ambition!" Jodorowsky
"You poets have made of love an immense imposture: what falls to us always seems less beautiful than these rhymes stuck together like two mouths on each other." L’Œuvre au Noir, Marguerite Yourcenar
"Each generation, no doubt, believes itself destined to remake the world. Yet mine knows that it will not remake it. But its task is perhaps greater. It consists in preventing the world from unraveling." Albert Camus
"Nature is not a place to visit. It is home..." Gary Snyder
"The world will not do you any favors, believe me,.If you want to have a life steal it." Lou Andres-Salome
"There is a law of beauty that is important to remember. In spite of the efforts of some, we seem to be walking towards this oblivion, so much mediocrity, monsters with a thousand heads, has faithful followers in modern societies." Claude Debussy
"Idiocy is a disease that goes well with fear. The one and the other fatten each other, creating a gangrene that only asks to spread." Philippe Claudel
"For the one around whom walls grow, it is salubrious to be disturbed. Happy are those who jump over these walls before they are too high." Elias Canetti
"The forbidden is in your heart and it alone matters to you, so send out two thousand years of modesty." Poèmes de jeunesse, Pier Paolo Pasolini
"One builds one's life for a person and, when at last one can receive him there, that person does not come, then dies in us and we live imprisoned in what was intended only for him." Marcel Proust
"What is beautiful in the animal world is that they know without telling each other everything and anything!... and from very far! At the speed of light!... we have a head full of words, frightening the trouble we go to in order to be emberliquer to the worst! No longer know anything. I would have liked that one finds in the words the song of the soul. To make the language sensitive again, so that it palpitates more than it reasons - such was my goal." Louis-Ferdinand Céline
"It is to inspire us almost with a desire to sin, to show so much care to prevent us from doing it." Molière
"Solitary life is an alchemical experience, a transmutation of the being which is not without danger: one must, with patience, burn away all impurity before hoping to see in oneself the Clear Primordial Light." François Augiéras
"Let us be the nightmare of those who want to deprive us of our dreams." Ernesto Che Guevara
"Modigliani complained that he did not understand my verses, And he suspected them of hiding miracles."
"The breath of art had not yet burned, Transfigured our two existences, It was the diaphanous hour before the dawn." Anna Akhmatova (Modigliani - Anna Akhmatova)
"And then, there are those whom you meet, whom you hardly know, who say a word, a sentence, give you a minute, half an hour and change the course of your life." Victor Hugo
"The connoisseur prefers simple beauty..." La fille naturelle, Goethe
"If God existed, it would be a library." Umberto Eco
"The abandoned earth, overloaded with letters of the alphabet, choked with knowledge and no more ears that listen in the cold." Le territoire de l’homme, Elias Canetti
"We will have consumed our world before we have changed our human species." André Leroi-Gourhan
"There are people so stupid that if an idea appeared on the surface of their brain, they would commit suicide, terrified of solitude." Emil Cioran
"Believe me, there is nothing more beautiful than to realize crazy ideas. I would like my life to be a series of crazy ideas." L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être, Milan Kundera
“But once in a while the odd thing happens, Once in a while the dream comes true, And the whole pattern of life is altered, Once in a while the moon turns blue.” W. H. Auden
"The satisfaction of the creative impulse is a basic biological need, essential to the health of the individual. Its cumulative effect on the health of society is inestimable." Writings on Art, Mark Rothko
"All memory is present." Novalis
"Homo Festivus: I have given that name to the modern inhabitant of our time [...] The festival, which was a break in the continuum of daily life, has become the whole of daily life." Philippe Muray
"Music is the only art that has movement itself as its subject." Paul Claudel
"The world is wrong. You believe that it is what you keep that makes you rich. I tell you that it is what you give away that makes you rich. All that you store up outside your heart is lost." Que ma joie demeure, Jean Giono
"Travel is a great lesson in modesty and stripping down, I think that's actually its main virtue. And if you manage to turn yourself into a smoke ring or to be the color of a wall, you get everywhere." Nicolas Bouvier
"You only meet a great thing once, a really great thing. After that, events no longer matter. I mean that they no longer change anything. They are no longer transparent, we no longer see through them, beyond them." Noce au Paradis, Mircea Eliade
“I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women to enter ordinary relationships, I want ecstasy!”
“Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession.” Anais Nin
"We already know it only too well for ourselves, ... this life is only a passing ordeal in spite of that, we cling to it, always hoping to discover happiness in it." Leo Tolstoy
"The egoist is not the one who lives as he pleases, it is the one who asks others to live as he pleases, the altruist is the one who lets others live their lives, without intervening." Oscar Wilde
"Every truth goes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Then it is strongly opposed. Then it is taken for obvious." Arthur Schopenhauer
"She wore chaste dresses and yet her body burned."
“To create is to live twice.” Albert Camus
"The work of art is a balance outside of time, an artificial health. I would argue that this is what an artist needs: a special world, to which he alone has the key." Diary, André Gide
"I call Poetry this reverse of time, this wide-eyed darkness, this passionate realm where I lose myself, this nocturnal sun, this cursed song as well that dies in my throat where the bells of provocation ring out." Écrits sur la poésie, Aragon
"Love is the only thing that gives meaning to our poor comings and goings on earth: not precisely a finding, I'm afraid. You'll think I'm crazy, but that's the way I drink too, as if absorbing an eternal sacrament." Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
"And then, something else bothers me about these supposedly universal Human Rights is that, precisely, they are not universals. There is always a double standard." Simone Veil
"I have gathered to write to you, the soul of all the flowers, and the ephemeral moments of all the birdsongs." Fernando Pessoa
"God? Since he is hidden from us by his perfection, I did not see him, certainly, as one sees the All, But I was in the suburbs of his Jerusalem. Bathing, purple cross, in the shadow of the clouds; I said with the corals of the Madreporian psalms." C. Norwid
"One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one’s capacity." Pierre-Auguste Renoir
"The theory of relativity contains no internal contradiction, to understand its basis is to gain access to the intelligence of the structures of the universe and approach the mystery of creation." Einstein and relativity by Etienne Klein
"You probably think as I do that the wisest, the most poetic, the best, are not those who put into their work all their poetry, all their goodness and all their science, but who still know how to put a little of it into their lives with an ingenious and prodigious hand." Marcel Proust
"I was handing myself over to her in the midst of these solitudes as to a road which one senses leads to the sea." The Opposing Shore, Julien Gracq
"If people knew how many failures it takes to make a success. How many successes to make a failure." Jean Cocteau
"One must accept the fact that others don't see what you do." Louise Bourgeois
“I’ll be the wind, the rain and the sunset, the light on your door to show you’re home.” Lou Reed
"To live is to move from one space to another trying as hard as possible not to bump into each other." Georges Perec
"I'm crazy, even of madness." Le Pèse-nerfs, Antonin Artaud
"I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about." Jean-Luc Godard
"To sin is not to do evil. The real sin is not to do good." Pier Paolo Pasolini
"Genius is precisely, at least in poetic matters, to be faithful to freedom." Notre besoin de Rimbaud, Yves Bonnefoy
"I like that music is not deaf to the song of the wind in the plain, nor insensitive to the perfumes of the night." Vladimir Jankélévitc
“Hope? I have none, and furthermore I condemn it with everything in my power. Hope is the flag, the special marker of hypocrisy... I don't believe in it. I believe only in my own vitality."
"To be a poet, you need time: many hours of solitude, the only way for something to take shape, to give style to chaos." La religion de mon temps
"The joy of the American who feels identical to another million Americans in the love of democracy: that is the disease of the future world! When the classical world is exhausted - when all the peasants and artisans will be dead - when industry has made the cycle of production and consumption unstoppable - then our history will end."
"I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief."
"Nothing ever dies in a lifetime. Everything survives. We, together, live and survive. So, too, every culture is always interwoven with survival."
Pasolini
"The genius of the Indian mind is not to shake the beliefs of the common man but to lead them by stages to the understanding of the deeper meaning behind their beliefs. But the West & the Indian elite want to write a full stop in a land where there are no full stops." Mark Tully
“I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.”
"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way... things I had no words for." Georgia O'Keeffe
"I have a lot of work to do today; I need to slaughter memory. Turn my living soul to stone. Then teach myself to live again…" The Verdict, Anna Akhmatova
"The happiness of those who know increases the beauty of the world and makes everything sunnier; knowledge not only puts beauty around things, but in the long run it introduces this beauty into things." Nietzsche
"I would like to be reborn, if it were possible, as modest, as a violet." Natsume Soseki
"Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult, it requires you to be a true poet." Kandinsky
"Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being."
"To define beauty is to fail to understand it." Le Livre de l'intranquillité, Fernando Pessoa
"The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle." Stanley Kubrick
"Sometimes my reveries end in meditation, but more often my meditations end in reverie, & during these distractions my soul wanders & hovers in the universe on the wings of the imagination, in ecstasies which pass all other enjoyment." Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"If the bee were to disappear, man would have only a few years to live. This is one of the versions of the sentence attributed to Einstein. Yes, the fate of humanity is linked to that of pollinators. And they are mostly insects, including bees." Hubert Reeves
"The most powerful civilization known to man, ours, can destroy the earth. I think that the task of the next century, in the face of the most terrible threat that humanity has known, is going to be to reintegrate the Gods into it." André Malraux
“We have to free half of the human race, the women, so that they can help to free the other half.” Emmeline Pankhurst, UK suffragette arrested in 1914
"Napoleon said to Madame de Staël: - I don't like women who deal with politics. - Perhaps, but in a country where their heads are cut off, it is natural for women to want to know why."
"There is something more in painting that cannot be explained, that is essential." Pierre-Auguste Renoir
"Everyone runs elsewhere and to the future, especially since no one has arrived at himself." Montaigne
"The woman is the marvelous. Everything in her steps is transfigured." Louis Aragon
"Ah, if only with a drop of poetry or love we could soothe the hatred of the world." Pablo Neruda
"When a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely." My Life, Carl Gustav Jung
"I am an anachronism..Take me back to the time when Dharma* was prevelant."
*Dharma: Law governing the order, the general arrangement of things (cosmic, social, religious) in Buddhism and Hinduism.
"- Why do you look sad? - Because you speak to me with words, and I answer you with feelings." Pierrot le fou, Jean-Luc Godard
"The past cannot simply be chopped down with an axe. We must discover what is dead and belongs in the grave and what is still alive and worthy of life." Fedor Shalyapin
"History for me is a material like landscape or color." Anselm Kiefer
"To want to prove things that are clear of themselves is to light the day with a lamp." Aristotle
"Biological and technical metamorphosis must be guided, regulated, controlled by an ethical, cultural and social metamorphosis." Edgar Morin
"There are more things in men to admire than things to despise." Albert Camus
“Silence has so much meaning.” Yurok Proverb
"Question to Albert Einstein: - What weapons will be used in World War III? - I don't know, but I know the ones that will be used in the fourth: rocks and sticks."
"If anyone tells you there is only one way, their way, get as far away from them as possible, both physically and philosophically." Jim Jarmusch
"We are all born crazy. A few remain so." En attendant Godot, Samuel Beckett
“Art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.” Saul Bellow
"We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.” Charles Bukowski
"The night will come that will hide with its shadow The great green palace of mystery." Soirée douce, Pablo Neruda
"You cannot have a proud and chivalrous spirit if your conduct is mean and paltry; for whatever a man's actions are, such must be his spirit." Démosthène
"Silence is a golden mountain. Everyone always knows what they need to know. When you get to the top of the mountain, keep climbing." The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac
"Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, without suspecting that true happiness lies in the way you climb the slope." Gabriel García Márquez
"All my life I have kept, engraved in my memory, certain landscapes that I had glimpsed in my travels, and which were, for me, fragments of a certain beauty of which I hoped, one day, to meet the archetype." The Twenty-Sixth Dream, John Buchan
"To understand Radha, you need to understand the mysteries & differences of 'rasa' and 'prema' – the ecstatic experience of spiritual love." India
"You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself."
"Man's greatness lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition." Albert Camus
"I am precisely irredeemably attracted to anything that is not reassuring, anything that involves a way of life. As soon as someone is in the possibility of falling, of getting hurt - he interests me." Françoise Sagan
"I like melodrama because it is situated just at the meeting point between life and theatre." Luchino Visconti
“Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace.” Night Train to Lisbon, Pascal Mercier
“Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.” Walter Benjamin
“Kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death.”
"In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions." Milan Kundera
“The value of things is not in the duration, but in the intensity in which they occur. This is why there are unforgettable moments, inexplicable things and incomparable people." Fernando Pessoa
"Culture resists the law, that's what it has always done and must always do."
"We can see today that imposing a culture of laws does not work. Culture, if it is to exist, can only be a form of negotiation in relation to the kind of order that laws want to impose on us."
"The idea of law is inscribed in an ordering of the world in its totality. There is a kind of cosmological dimension: it is not only a matter of controlling the behavior of human beings and making sure that the city functions well, but of making sure that the world does not collapse into chaos. As if there could be no other world than that of order." Laurent de Sutter, philosopher, Affaire en cours, France Culture, 16.03.2021
"I live life in the margins of society, and the rules of normal society don’t apply to those who live on the fringe." Tamara de Lempicka
"The world will never die for lack of wonder but only for lack of wonder." Gilbert Keith Chesterton
"What we must seek and find is the serene sweetness of an unshakeable peace." Alexandra David-Néel
"From the most visible, we must now go to the least visible, which is also the most revealing and the most true." Philippe Jaccottet
"In spring I dreamt of the universal music of all living things. I encountered endless dead cities and mourned myself. .. Now I must rekindle my life ! At last I can see the generous sun once more and be free." Egon Schiele, 1910
"I often think it would be best not to attempt the solution of the problem of life. Living is hard enough without complicating the process by thinking about it." Limbo, Aldous Huxley
"There are many worlds and each of them is important and we must know them because these other worlds, these other cultures, are mirrors in which we can see ourselves, through which we can better understand ourselves." [...] "We are human because we tell stories and myths.." Hérodote, Arpenter le monde, Sur les épaules de Darwin, March 20, 2021
"We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” E. M. Forster
"I like to hold my hand on the trunk of a tree I pass by, not to assure myself of the tree's existence - of which I have no doubt - but of my own." Christian Bobin
“Anything is an Art if you do it at the level of an Art.” Richard Avedon
"The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it." Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"The artist was buried in the Pantheon in Rome. His epitaph, too, is poetry and genius: 'Here lies Raphael, who during his life made Nature fear to be mastered by him and, when he died, to die with him.'"
"Think much, feel more and speak little." Goethe
"Picasso is a man for whom painting means seeing and who better than anyone 'lives' his century. He affirmed that painting was not made to decorate apartments but to carry a political statement."
"One may wonder if the state of the art world would have been the same without Pablo Picasso. He is the center of a world, which is his own and which is going to influence the whole world. Picasso is the artist-world. He is not only painter. He is 'all'". Sophie Chauveau, L'oeuvre autobiographique de Picasso, France Culture, 23/03/2021
"What a good thing to love and be loved; to know that an elite nature has understood yours." Pierre Loti
"Ummān Mānda was the ancient Sumerian version of the end of times, or, the Scourge of Gods : when civilisation became corrupt the gods would send destruction in the form of nomadic hordes from the wilderness - to destroy, so it could be rebuilt."
"The meaning of the poem is among the bamboo." Ts'ien K'i / 8th century Chinese poet
"I travel to check out my dreams." Gérard de Nerval
"No society is irredeemable, no middle age is final. However thick the night may be, one always sees a light." Victor Hugo
Covid-19: "To get out of it would require a powerful desire for freedom." according to the writer François Sureau
"The "slightly sinister comedy" of the current situation, and the health crisis, he explains: "What strikes me is the slightly sinister comedy. [...] There is a side of Father Ubu and the three little pigs. I received a message from a prefect friend who was himself tetanized by the mechanics of the attestation. When the great executors of the system start to doubt, there is something wrong. In reality, we are witnessing the collapse of 10 or 20 years of technocratic management of society. This is what Marc Bloch described in "L'étrange défaite" in 1940."
"The pandemic has aggravated elements that already existed and will be maintained in the common law, and "to get out of it we would need a powerful desire for freedom. This supposes that we recover the awareness that what constitutes us is this adventurous freedom from which everything must proceed, below and beyond politics". The great interview, France Inter, 26,03,2021
"I love you, my poor angel, you know it well, and yet you want me to write it to you. You are right. We must love each other, and then we must say it, and then we must write it, and then we must kiss each other on the mouth, on the eyes, and elsewhere." Victor Hugo
"I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself." Anaïs Nin
“Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature ... The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you.” Joseph Campbell
"Success always comes at a price, and we pay in suffering." Kenji Mizoguchi
"No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead ? Don't ask, walk !" Friedrich Nietzsche
"The marvelous is always beautiful, there is even only the marvelous that is beautiful." André Breton
"Get rid of sadness and melancholy. Life is sweet, it is short and we must enjoy it now." Federico García Lorca
"Poetry to assist the song of a walk around the Sea... And it was the Sea that came to us on the stone steps of the drama..." Amers, Saint-John Perse
“Even before Flaubert, people knew stupidity existed [...] The most scandalous thing about Flaubert's vision of stupidity is this: Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress!“ Milan Kundera
“I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.” Sergei Rachmaninoff
"Even to this day the Homeric hymns have the power of freeing us, at any rate, for moments, from the frightful burden which the tradition of several thousand years has rolled upon us." Maxims and reflections. Goethe
"Jesus did not come to explain away suffering or remove it. He came to fill it with His Presence." Paul Claudel
"The sea, the rains, the need, the desire, the struggle against death, this is what unites us all. We are alike in what we see together, in what we suffer together. Dreams change with men, but the reality of the world is our common homeland." Albert Camus
"We must get out of the divide between believers and non-believers: it is a Western divide in which we have long defined our reference points. [...] We can be touched by the beauty of the world, feel a form of spirituality completely secular."
"We have lost this anchoring to the earth, city dwellers no longer have contact with nature. [...] To consider that nature is just raw material for making objects is a colossal loss." Frédéric Lenoir
"Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted."
“Who made Art History? Not the most reasonable people. The mad men did. If painting is the mirror of a time, it must be mad to have a true image of what that time is.” Max Ernst
"There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman." Letter to Paul Cézanne, Émile Zola
"The whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things." Hans Christian Andersen
"A foolish person will make many mistakes eventually realizing that making mistakes was the only path to wisdom." Lakota saying
"You have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it." Flannery O’Connor
"Fear annihilates all happiness." Hannah Arendt
"I wanted to draw the awareness of existing and the flow of time."
"Poetry is a gift from nature, A grace, not a work." Henri Michaux
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, [...] who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, …" Allen Ginsberg
"Insanity is to always behave the same way and expect a different result." Albert Einstein
"Art is a magic which makes the hours melt away and even days dissolve into seconds." Leonora Carrington
“I have always liked people who can't adapt themselves to life pragmatically.” Sculpting in Time, Andréi Arsényevich Tarkovsky
"I have never looked for dream in reality or reality in dream. I have allowed my imagination free play, and I have not been led astray by it." Gustave Moreau
"There are still people who do not know how to approach a subject without applying compartments and boxes to it, and who imagine that in the boxes things present themselves with more clarity, whereas they are perfectly dead there." Elias Canetti
"Time does not move fast when it is observed. It feels held in view. But it takes advantage of our distractions. Perhaps there are even two times, the one we observe and the one that transforms us." Albert Camus
"My art is an exorcism, and beauty is something I never talk about." Louise Bourgeois
"That possibility suggests that we are part of a much greater system of many realities, within realities, within other realities." Gregg B, Cherokee
"I improvise my painting like a musician improvises his music." Francis Picabia
“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.” The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde
"Everything you can imagine is real." Pablo Picasso
"Extract the eternal from the ephemeral."
“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
"Your dress will be my Desire, quivering, undulating, my Desire that rises and falls, At the tips sways, at the valleys rests, And coats with a kiss all your white and pink body." To a Madonna
"One must always be drunk. All is there: it is the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of time which breaks your shoulders and bends you towards the ground, It is necessary to intoxicate you without truce." The Spleen of Paris, Charles Baudelaire (bicentennial of his birth on April 9, 1821)
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, & sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." Rudyard Kipling
"I have created nothing, I have invented nothing. I am a reporter of words, of circumstances, a critical, judging, appreciative, extremely realistic mind, to which it is difficult to make believe. Nothing more. I can add: the merit of writing with warmth, spontaneously, without work, promptly and neatly, - and some spirit." Literary Journal, Paul Léautaud
"Brother, this is why poets, often, Butt at every step on the paths of the world: With their eyes fixed on the sky, they go away dreaming." Terza rima, Théophile Gautier
"One looks for retreats in the country, at the sea and in the mountains; you yourself are used to coveting that. But this is perfectly foolish since at any moment one can withdraw into oneself." Thoughts for Myself, Marcus Aurelius
"It's a running of the bulls, a singing tour. It's exactly the same thing. But it's not a killing, it's a love-making a little..." Jacques Brel
"To protect animals against the cruelty of men, to give them food if they are hungry, drink if they are thirsty, to run to their aid if they are exhausted by fatigue or sickness. This is the most beautiful virtue of the strong towards the weak." Giuseppe Garibaldi
"Those who watch the lion suffer in its cage, rot in the lion's memory." Centon, René Char
"A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul." Johann Wolfgang Goethe
"The world's problems cannot be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that have never existed." John Keats
"True sadness is a good school of life. You come out of it a little parched, but robust and with the modesty of tears. One looks at life with a more generous eye." L’épithalame, Jacques Chardonne
"Living a spiritual life is to simply find what revitalizes your spirit." Lakota saying
"Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass, it's about learning how to dance in the rain." Sénèque
"Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint." Robert Delaunay
"She really wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris." Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
"The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears [...] to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown…" Le Tao du voyage, Paul Theroux
"At that point I learned you have to go beyond the image [...] in that sense of composing and taking it up to the ‘orgasm’ or what he (Cartier-Bresson) called ‘the decisive moment'." René Burri
"Never use a new word, unless it has these three qualities: to be necessary, intelligible and sound." Voltaire
"You can read, read, read, which is the most beautiful thing you can do in your youth: and, slowly, you will feel enriched inside, you will feel that special experience which is culture forming in you." Pier Paolo Pasolini
"Psychoanalysis has no effect on stupidity." Jacques Lacan
"Art exists to forget the abominations of life." Aristide Maillol
"I will admit that there are other people who are primarily interested in doing something. I am not. I can very well live without doing anything. But I cannot live without at least trying to understand whatever happens." Hannah Arendt
"The present societies see, in the external height, the moon and they go there. They do not go to a certain inner height of which they have no notion." Tous feux éteints, Henry de Montherlant
"If you could read my mind, I’m pretty sure you’d either be traumatized, sexually aroused or both. [...] I dreamed of touching the sadness of the world; at the disenchanted edge of a strange swamp." L’Archangélique, Georges Bataille
"Yellow can express happiness, and then again, pain. There is flame red, blood red and rose red ; every color harbors its own soul…" Emil Nolde
"But the sources of great events are like those of rivers; in vain do we explore the earth's surface, we can never find them." Marcel Proust
"We are not crazy. We are human. We want to love, and someone must forgive us for the roads we take to love, for the roads are many and dark, and we are fiery and cruel on our journey." Leonard Cohen
"Oh, beautiful modernity! What crimes are committed in your name." James Ensor
"When I think of myself, my thought seeks itself in the ether of a new space. I am in the moon as others are in their balconies." Le Pèse-Nerfs, Antonin Artaud
"Humor strengthens our survival instinct and saves our sanity." Charlie Chaplin
"Clarity is not born of what we imagine to be clear, but of what we become aware of to be dark." C. G. Jung
"Do not read, as children read for amusement, nor as the ambitious read, for instruction. No read to live.." Gustave Flaubert
"My originality consists in putting logic of the visible to the service of the invisible." Odilon Redon
"Since we can't extract beauty from life, let's at least try to extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life. Let's make our failure into a victory, into something positive and lofty, endowed with columns, majesty, and our mind's consent." Fernando Pessoa
"Poetry is the highest expression allowed to man. It is normal that it no longer finds any credence in a world that is only interested in vulgar gossip." Jean Cocteau
"Paradise is not lost because the smallest blade of grass enchants me... Paradise is everywhere but we don't see it." Jacques-Henri Lartigue.
"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." Albert Einstein
"Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent, half of art, the other half of which is the eternal and the unchanging." Charles Baudelaire
"All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression." Richard Diebenkorn
"Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it." André Gide
"Art is always, without ceasing, busy with two things: it persistently reflects on death and incessantly creates life by this." Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
"One of the problems of our society today is that people don't want to be useful, but important." Winston Churchill
"Fanaticism is a monster that dares to call itself the son of religion." Voltaire
"A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator." Eugene Delacroix
"He knows that there is no other way out than to accept the end of everything that has ended in humiliation, or in a little bit of poetry..." Poetry in the shape of a rose, Pier Paolo Pasolini
"The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long." Ludwig Wittgenstein
"The sight of a marsh hawk in Concord meadows is worth more to me than the entry of the allies into Paris. In this sense I am not ambitious. .. That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest." Journal, Henry David Thoreau, March 11, 1856
"But I do feel strange-almost unearthly. I'll never get used to being alive. It's a mystery. Always startled to find I've survived." John Steinbeck
"It always takes a stroke of madness to build a destiny." Les Yeux ouverts, Marguerite Yourcenar
"If I paint like a barbarian, it’s because we live in a barbarous age." Karel Appel
"Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions…" Yves Klein
"True action, good and radiant action, my friends, does not spring from activity, from busy bustling, it does not spring from industrious hammering. It grows in the solitude of the mountains, it grows on the summits where silence and danger dwell."
"Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours." Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse
"The world is not a factory and animals are not products for our use." Arthur Schopenhauer
"If Art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?" Journal of Solitude, May Sarton
"What was progress at one point, when it continue it in a stupid way, it becomes totally destructive." Dominique Bourg, program C Ce Soir, May 5, 2021
"You can't stop yourself from getting old, but you can stop yourself from becoming old." Henri Matisse
"One must not encroach on the future by asking, before time, for what can only come with time." Arthur Schopenhauer
"Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life." The World of Yesterday
"He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant. We must approach knowledge from the inside; inspired by passion." Confusion of Feelings, Stefan Zweig
"The spectacle of nature is always beautiful." Aristote
"I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador […] an adventurer…" Letter to Wilhelm Fliess, February 1 1900, Sigmund Freud
"Many years ago, reading about the old oral cultures where wisdom and history lived not in books but on the tongue…" Lewis Hyde
"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced." Soren Kierkegaard
"The teaching of Zen, as I often repeat, is from my soul to your soul." Taisen Deshimaru
"That which is supple triumphs over that which is hard." Lao Tseu
"I assert that life is beautiful inspite of everything." Piotr Ivan Tchaikovsky
"Fighting with the same weapons as your enemy, you will become like him." Nietzsche
"To be happy, you must eliminate two things: the fear of a future evil and the memory of a past evil." Seneca
"Never has mankind united so much power with so much helplessness, so much knowledge with so much uncertainty." Paul Valéry
"The artist must not copy nature but take the elements of nature and create a new element." Paul Gauguin
"One morning, after so much despair, an irrepressible desire to live will announce to us that everything is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness."." Albert Camus
"Love is when someone starts talking to you like a river, like a star or like the honeysuckle flower..." The Joy Man, Christian Bobin
"Always be a little kinder than necessary." J.M. Barrie
"A dancer's world is a man's heart with its joys, hopes, fears and loves." Martha Graham, dancer
"Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives." Joseph Beuys
"True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist." The Human Side , Albert Einstein
"Life is an adventure. Don't go where the path may lead, rather go where there is no path and blaze a trail." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin." Bruce Chatwin
"Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling." Miguel de Unamuno
"The mystic poets say That rivers know ecstasies Under the moonlight." Sweet evening and night, Fernando Pessoa
"Have the infinite as your pillow. Love, believe, hope, live, be like the one with a watering can in his hand." V Hugo
"We travel, some of us forever, to seek other places, other lives, other souls." Anaïs Nin
"Most of the time, power has to do with dominance. But poetry is never about dominance. Poetry is powerful but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone. It means making a connection. That’s what it means." June Jordan
"Beautiful souls find it difficult to believe in evil, in ingratitude, they need hard lessons before they recognize the extent of human corruption." Honoré de Balzac
"The are man made laws and there are spiritual laws. We choose spiritual laws." Native American saying
"Be curious, not judgmental." Walt Whitman
"It is not that men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak." On Liberty , John Stuart Mill
"Nothing is lost, sweet self, Nothing is ever lost. The unspoken word Is not exhausted but can be heard. Music that stains The silence remains O echo is everywhere, the unbeckonable bird!" Echo , Lawrence Durrell
"Theater is a social problem like all artistic issues." Gérard Philippe
"We haven't two hearts, one for animals and one for humans. We only have a heart or not." Alphonse de Lamartine
Besançon, May 22nd 2021