Atul Sabnis > Atul's Quotes

“...I didn't bring my peremptory tone to bear in regard to what you'd just said about the unnecessariness of sleep but only, only, mind you, because of the fact that I absolutely, simply, purely and without any whatevers have to sleep now, I mean, man, my eyes are closing, they're redhot, sore, tired, beat...”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“Own your creativity. You are creative with the same juice that flows in all of life. The question is not whether you are creative enough but whether you will free yourself to express it.”
― Ian Roberts, Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“A recurrent question about photography is how much self expression it allows the photographer. There are two standard positions, each corresponding to a different location oh photographic skill. The opposition is neatly summed up in Bioy Casares’s novel The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata (1989). The hero Nicolasito Almanza declares: ‘I am convinced that all of photography depends on the moment we press the release […] I believe that you’re a photographer if you know exactly when to press the release.’ In making this declaration he is responding to the opinion expressed by Mr Gruter, owner of a photographic laboratory: ‘[…] sometimes I wonder if the true work of the photographer doesn’t begin in the dark room, amid the trays and the enlarger.”
― Clive Scott, Spoken Image

“Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them. Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed. I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room.

The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love. My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.”
― Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients

“For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.”
― John Dewey

“Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest. (Let no man belong to another that can belong to himself.)”
― Paracelsus

“Dharma is easiest to spot by its absence: the Mahabharata employs the pedagogical technique of teaching about dharma via its opposite, adharma”
― Gurcharan Das

“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“If values are woven into the very concept of education, where is the need for separate value education?”
― Vijaya Bharathy

“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.”
― Robert Frank

“As we have seen there is some kind of continuity in any case since every experience affects for better or worse the attitudes which help decide the quality of further experiences, by setting up certain preference and aversion, and making it easier or harder to act for this or that end.”
― John Dewey

“Do not be afraid of the word 'theory'. Yes, it can sound dauntingly abstract at times, and in the hands of some writers can appear to have precious little to do with the actual, visual world around us. Good theory however, is an awesome thing. [...] But unless we actually use it, it borders on the metaphysical and might as well not be used at all.”
― Richard Howells, Visual Culture

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.”
― Albert Einstein

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”
― Erich Fromm

“Tradition is a fragile thing in a culture built entirely on the memories of the elders.”
― Alice Albinia, Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River

“Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding, and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East

“The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity's most powerful and a senseless desire - the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important?”
― Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East

“Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.”
― Vera Nazarian

“What has validity is your living, not what happens tomorrow.”
― J. Krishnamurti, Why Are You Being Educated?: Talks at Indian Universities

“The battle of Panipat was fought for more than what is usually imagined. It was fought by a people in the far south of India, on behalf of the Mughal Emperor, for the defence of India.”
― Uday S. Kulkarni, Solstice at Panipat: 14 January 1761

“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.”
― David Foster Wallace, Up, Simbal!: 7 Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate

“वर्तमान शिक्षा-पद्धति रास्ते में पड़ी हुई कुतिया है, जिसे कोई भी लात मार सकता है।”
― Shrilal Shukla

“Social ascendency, innocently disguised as high fashion, good taste or prestigious expenditure, was the same the world over.”
― John Keay

“[...] a time when anarchists were truly fearsome —less because they were willing to put a brick through a Starbucks window than because they had figured out how to organize themselves in a functional, egalitarian, and sufficiently productive society.”
― Noam Chomsky, Chomsky On Anarchism

“Networks inherently bring a unique challenge. When value moves in a straight line (as in the case of pipes), it can move in only one direction.”
― Sangeet Paul Choudary, Platform Scale: How an emerging business model helps startups build large empires with minimum investment