quotes

“It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.” Sally Kempton

“I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.” John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)

“The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps.” Carl Sagan

“If we look at the Japanese artist, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise. What does he spend his time doing? Studying a single blade of grass.” Vincent van Gogh

“Water is the driving force of all nature.” Leonardo daVinci

“Great photographs have the power to inform by presenting in isolation and with clarity that which is lost in the web of familiarity. They can expand our consciousness by showing us things we have never seen, closed our eyes to, or forgot to notice.” Carol Ehlers, Curator, LaSalle Bank Photography Collection

“I’m absolutely positive it’s in our human nature to want to know about the past. . . . I think it probably has something to do with our survival as a species. For nine-tenths of the time that human beings have been on earth, knowledge that was essential to survival was transmitted from one generation to the next by the vehicle of story.” David McCullough: The Danger of Historical Amnesia, 2002

“Why should it be that whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination.” Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) American mythological scholar

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.” Thomas Pynchon, writer (1937- )

“The chief condition on which life, health, and vigor depend, is action. It is by action that an organism develops its faculties, increases its energy, and attains the fulfillment of its destiny.” Pierre Joseph Proudhon

“The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” C. G. Jung

“The charm, one might say the genius of memory, is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.” Elizabeth Bowen, novelist (1899-1973

“Do your work as though it was to last a thousand years and you were to die tomorrow.” Ann Lee

“Age gives you the freedom to do some things you've never done before. Great work can come at any stage of your life.” Will Barnet

“The end of all method is to seem to have no method.” Lu Ch'Ai

“The rewards of the journey far outweigh the risk of leaving the harbor.” Unknown

“Grace is to the body, what good sense is to the mind.” Francois de La Rouchefoucauld

“To give pleasure to a single heart by a single kind act is better than a thousand head-bowings in prayer.” Saadi, poet (c. 1200 AD)

“I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.” Bernard Berenson

A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the whole universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it. Corita Kent

“The most aggravating thing about the younger generation is that I no longer belong to it.” Albert Einstein