John > John's Quotes

“You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.”
― Billy Collins

“Why do we sacrifice so much energy to our art?

Not in order to teach others but to learn with them what our existence, our organism, our personal and repeatable experience have to give us; to learn to break down the barriers which surround us and to free ourselves from the breaks which hold us back, from the lies about ourselves which we manufacture daily for ourselves and for others; to destroy the limitations caused by our ignorance or lack of courage; in short, to fill the emptiness in us: to fulfill ourselves...art is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light.”
― Jerzy Grotowski

“Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.”
― Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Post-Industrial Society

“Yudhisthira replies that anger leads to evil and should not be indulged; better far is forbearance. (3.30)”
― John D. Smith, The Mahabharata

“If you truly love someone, your love sees past their humanness”
― Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

“The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

“What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“почти всичко може да бъде допълнително опростено.”
― Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking

“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.”
― Edward De Bono

“Simplicity before understanding is simplistic; simplicity after understanding is simple.
- Edward De Bono”
― Edward De Bono

“Unfortunately, our existing traditional thinking habits insist that you must attack something and show it to be bad before you can suggest a change. It is more difficult to acknowledge that something is excellent and then to ask for change because although it is excellent, it is not enough.”
― Edward De Bono, Think!: Before It's Too Late

“To cultivate a pleasure in being wrong sounds perverse, yet losing an argument means escaping from an old idea and the acquisition of a new way of looking at things.”
― Edward De Bono, Lateral Thinking: An Introduction

“He's ambitious—even excessively ambitious. He wants to become a provocateur, but he doesn't know a single revolutionary song.”
― Teffi, Subtly Worded

“I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is me
I believe in my dance-- And my destiny”
― Sam Shepard

“When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.”
― John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous: Essays