At the Center of All Beauty Quotes

“Wisdom begins in listening; listening begins in silence; silence is rooted in solitude.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“We must teach ourselves to value flux, but more than that, we must teach ourselves to value and attend to friends, not as way-stations between lovers or diversions from the real business of pairing up and marriage, but as relationships of first consequence in their own right.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“When crises come, though friends and relatives may be generous and eager to help, in the end it is I, alone on the trail, alone in the museum, alone in the courtroom, alone in the emergency room, alone in the morgue, alone in my illness, alone in my reading, alone in my writing, alone in the silence of my heart.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“To choose to be alone is to bait the trap, to create a space the demons cannot resist entering. And that's the good news; the demons that enter can be named, written about, and tamed through the miracle of the healing word, the miracle of art, the miracle of silence.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“Never change your plans because of the weather, be Zen and go with the weather, let the weather reveal itself to you in all its variety and grandeur.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“For travel is a stimulus to the imagination, and imagination is the very path to love.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“music. To be an artist is not, finally, about product; it is about process, a way of being, and every solitary is of necessity an artist—an artist of her or his life, with little or no help from conventional rites and forms and mythologies, making it up as we go.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“I have always felt to be true: that the greatest achievement in life is to work out the terms of one’s own salvation, however one may define that term. “Free to make mistakes and be the master of one’s own destiny,”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“At the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. . . . if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“Why don’t the entertainment industry and religious institutions support more songs, books, movies praising friendship? Because friendship, unlike marriage, offers no capital to church, state, and corporation.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“The solitary traveler occupies a place of openness that becomes a place of radical empowerment, because learning begins in letting go, becoming vulnerable, feeling awkward and stupid, losing the self to find the self.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“How many relationships endure not from love but because one or both partners fear solitude more than they fear mayhem?”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“In a society obsessed with coupling (turn on the radio and try to find a song that’s not about true love—getting it, wanting it, losing it, getting it back), the solitary acts as a contemporary court jester, telling truths about our communities that those certified by the laws of state and church are unable to perceive or unwilling to speak aloud.”
― Fenton johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“This is why one becomes a monk: to cultivate in every moment presence to the beauty of the world.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“The artist or writer does not impose harmony on reality but—with sufficient reverence and diligence and selflessness and solitude—uncovers the harmony that is always there but that we conceal from ourselves out of a preferencia for material comfort and fear of the consequences a full and unreserved embrace of harmony requires. This faith in the underlying harmony roots itself in a love of and appreciation for nature, because nature, no matter how extreme the human abuse heaped on her, embodies a quiet, continual knitting and healing of life, ever dependent on death to make herself anew. 'Art is a harmony parallel to nature,' Cézanne wrote—not identical with but parallel to nature. Art of any kind, undertaken with atención and focus and as part of a commitment to discipline, is an effort at reenactment of the original creative gesture—the precipitation of the universe at the moment of its creation. That, I believe, is why we sing, paint, dance, sculpt, write; that is why cualquier one of us sets out to create something from nothing, and why the creative impulse is essentially religious or, if you prefer, spiritual. We seek to recreate the original creative gesture, whatever or whoever set it in motion—the bringing into being of what is. We seek the center of beauty.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“This is the magic of the word in print: not that it answers questions but that it composes an ongoing score for life, a mute chorus of voices as alive and evolving as light.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life