Keely > Keely's Quotes

“To hold a pen is to be at war.”
― Voltaire

“Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. ”
― Pablo Picasso, Pablo Picasso: Metamorphoses of the Human Form : Graphic Works, 1895-1972

“What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”
― Pablo Picasso

“We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it...myself included.”
― Picasso

“It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.”
― Pablo Picasso

“It would be very interesting to preserve photographically not the stages, but the metamorphoses of a picture. Possibly one might then discover the path followed by the brain in materializing a dream.”
― Pablo Picasso

“The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“You will hear thunder and remember me,
and think: she wanted storms...”
― Anna Akhmatova

“You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.”
― Richard Price

“drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnal
round, the monotonous sorrow of the finite,

within       I am awake

repairing in dirt the frayed immaculate thread
forced by being to watch the birth of suns”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“Do not be concerned with the faults of other persons. Do not see others' faults with a hateful mind. There is an old saying that if you stop seeing others' faults, then naturally seniors and venerated and juniors are revered. Do not imitate others' faults; just cultivate virtue. Buddha prohibited unwholesome actions, but did not tell us to hate those who practice unwholesome actions.”
― Zen Master Dogen

“do not view mountains from the scale of human thought”
― Dogen

“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”
― Gary Snyder

“When the mind is exhausted of images, it invents its own.”
― Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold: Technical Notes & Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries

“All that we did was human,
stupid, easily forgiven,
Not quite right.”
― Gary Snyder

“Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.”
― Gary Snyder

“All this new stuff goes on top
turn it over, turn it over
wait and water down
from the dark bottom
turn it inside out
let it spread through
Sift down even.
Watch it sprout.

A mind like compost.”
― Gary Snyder

“With no surroundings there can be no path, and with no path one cannot become free.”
― Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

“Being the Stream

Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the
stream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream,
so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies.
Meditation may take one out of the world, but it also puts one totally
into it.”
― Gary Snyder

“I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life,
And dammit, that’s just what
I’ve gone and done.”
― Gary Snyder

“Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.”
― Gary Snyder

“Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles --
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.”
― Gary Snyder

“Having a place means that you know what a place means...what it means in a storied sense of myth, character and presence but also in an ecological sense...Integrating native consciousness with mythic consciousness”
― Gary Snyder

“Range after range of mountains.
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.”
― Gary Snyder

“The size of the place that one becomes
a member of is limited only by
the size of one’s heart.”
― Gary Snyder

“The Buddha taught that all life is suffering. We might also say that life, being both attractive and constantly dangerous, is intoxicating and ultimately toxic. 'Toxic' comes from toxicon, Pendell tells us, with a root meaning of 'a poisoned arrow.' All organic life is struck by the arrows of real and psychic poisons. This is understood by any true, that is to say, not self-deluding, spiritual path.”
― Gary Snyder, Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft

“The blue mountains are constantly walking." Dōgen is quoting the Chan master Furong. -- "If you doubt mountains walking you do not know your own walking."

-- Dōgen is not concerned with "sacred mountains" - or pilgrimages, or spirit allies, or wilderness as some special quality. His mountains and streams are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and non-being together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. Roots, stems, and branches are all equally scratchy. No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild.

So the blue mountains walk to the kitchen and back to the shop, to the desk, to the stove. We sit on the park bench and let the wind and rain drench us. The blue mountains walk out to put another coin in the parking meter, and go down to the 7-Eleven. The blue mountains march out of the sea, shoulder the sky for a while, and slip back to into the waters.”
― Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

“Clouds sink down the hills
Coffee is hot again. The dog
Turns and turns about, stops and sleeps.”
― Gary Snyder, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems