"Why be a song when you can be a symphony?"
- Tim Booth
“To be a muse is to be a wonder in someone else’s eyes, flaws and all.”
– L.H. Cosway, Still Life With String
“I have come more and more to the belief that we owe our arts a thousand times what we are paying them. We support our cigarette factories, soap manufacturers, beauticians, all the luxury and pleasure businesses of our over-indulged civilization, but we pay our painters an average wage… and yet when the future digs us from the past they won’t care how we smell, what we smoke, or if we bathed. All they’ll know of us will be our architecture, our paintings, sculpture, poems, laws, philosophy, drama, our pottery and fabrics, the things which our hands made and our minds thought up - oh, the machines they’ll dig up too, but perhaps they’ll point to them as our destruction, the wheels that drove us down to death.”
― Vincent Price, I Like What I Know: A Visual Autobiography
"Never regret thy fall,
O Icarus of the fearless flight
For the greatest tragedy of them all
Is never to feel the burning light."
- Oscar Wilde
"There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds."
- Laurell k. Hamilton
Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That’s its balance.”
― Osho, Everyday Osho: 365 Daily Meditations for the Here & Now
― Osho, Everyday Osho: 365 Daily Meditations for the Here & Now
"I am at one with a sea of sensations, glitter, silk, skin, eyes, mouths, desire."
- Anais Nin, Journals, Vol. 1
"I don't know because I am not myself. I do all my work to escape myself. I don't believe in looking into yourself. If you do this, you just discover a lot of shit. I think what we should do is throw ourselves out of ourselves. The truth is not deep in ourselves. The truth is outside.
Regarding Zen, this is also the cause of my ethical disagreement with Zen Buddhism. The way Zen Buddhism is perceived today is as telling ourselves we must not throw ourselves fully into reality, that we must not attach ourselves too much to earthly objects. Since external reality is just a flow of appearances. I believe on the contrary, that we should fully attach ourselves to earthly objects. If you write a book, forget about everything else, throw yourself into it. If you are in love, go to the end, sacrifice everything for the object of love. This is why we today no longer want to fall in love. We want it controlled, like safe sex. But what I like in love is precisely the fall. I feel alive only when I fall. And this goes up to the beginning: I think Hegel already knew that Adam's fall was the greatest achievement, the greatest event in history."
- Slavoj Zizek
They had never been closer in their month of love nor communicated more profoundly with one another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again."
- Anais Nin
"Ordinary life does not interest me."
- Anais Nin
If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.
—Anaïs Nin
“When in a relationship, a real man doesn't make his woman jealous of others, he makes others jealous of his woman.”
― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.
“
| — | D.H. Lawrence |
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
~ C.S. Lewis
“One of the reasons for the extraordinary pressure of consumerism, which goes back to the 1920s, is the recognition by the business world that unless it atomizes people, unless it drives them to what it calls the “superficial things of life, such as fashionable consumption,” the population may turn on them. Right now, for example, about 80% of the U.S. population believes that the country is, in their words, run by “a few big interests looking out for themselves,” not for the benefit of the population. About 95% of the population thinks that the government ought to pay regular attention to public opinion. The degree of alienation from institutions is enormous. As long as people are atomized, worried about maxing out their credit cards, separated from one another, and don’t hear serious critical discussion, the ideas can be controlled.”
— Noam Chomsky
“You don’t have to choose between your sexual side, your intellectual side, your emotional side, or your spiritual side…. Just combine them all into one powerful expression and shine that brilliant light all across this world and beyond.”
- Author Unknown
"I design clothes because I don’t want women to look innocent and naive…I want people to be afraid of the women I dress."
Alexander McQueen
There is nothing more rare, nor more beautiful, than a woman being unapologetically herself; comfortable in her perfect imperfection. To me, that is the true essence of beauty.
| — | Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience |
Be crumbled.
So wild flowers will come up where you are.
You have been stony for too many years.
Try something different.
Surrender.
So wild flowers will come up where you are.
You have been stony for too many years.
Try something different.
Surrender.
| — | Rumi |
If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders.
—Andrew Harvey
All you need now is to stand at the window and let your rhythmical sense open and shut, open and shut, boldly and freely, until one thing melts in another, until the taxis are dancing with the daffodils, until a whole has been made from all these separate fragments.
—Virginia Woolf, A Letter To A Young Poet
"People will kill you over time, and how they'll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like: 'be realistic.'" - Dylan Moran
"I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am." - Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.
—Sylvia Plath
People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.
—Jim Morrison
“The power of communication will be how women change the world, the power of communication where feeling is concerned...Men need women to grow in power so that they can grow in power. Their resistance to women is simply their resistance to becoming more powerful. It is the same as awakening. And, agree to open to your feminine power. You can do this in words if you wish or you can just do it by feeling. Agree to open to your feminine power whether you are male or female. It is the missing piece for so many of you and the truth is, it is waiting. For, you will bring into your life a renewed sense of energy and, when you’ve surrendered to femininity, action occurs in a way that you would not expect. All you need do is open to that energy. And men, do not be scared. You will not lose any of your masculinity - quite the opposite. And women, do not be afraid of what it will expose you to. Many of you are afraid of being exposed. Many of you sense the anger and violence in the world which you attribute as a male quality and you do not want to come up against that. The more you give of your feminine energy, the less this anger and violence will be in evidence on your planet.” ~ Zapharia (channelled through Lee Harris. Extract from the video, ‘The Power of Women’)
"They used to drive a stake of wood through the suicide's heart in the grave. As if it wasn't broken already."
- James Joyce
“...for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
She was perfect, pure maddening sex, and she knew it, and she played on it, dripped it, and allowed you to suffer for it.
—Charles Bukowski, Factotum
"To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell."
- Gabriel Gárcia Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
"Marry your best friend. I do not say that lightly. Really, truly find the strongest, happiest friendship in the person you fall in love with. Someone who speaks highly of you. Someone you can laugh with. The kind of laughs that make your belly ache, and your nose snort. The embarrassing, earnest, healing kind of laughs. Wit is important. Life is too short not to love someone who lets you be a fool with them. Make sure they are somebody who lets you cry, too. Despair will come. Find someone that you want to be there with you through those times. Most importantly, marry the one that makes passion, love, and madness combine and course through you. A love that will never dilute - even when the waters get deep, and dark."
| - |
The world has exploded with new discoveries for healthy eating, yet we have never seen a TV commercial that is anti-dairy. The new slogan for McDonalds is "we don't give a fork" - and never were words more truthfully revealed. The biggest threat to the survival of this planet is the meat industry. Meat is more dangerous for humans than tobacco. CO2, methane and nitrous oxide caused from "livestock" are rapidly killing our waterways. No country has yet developed a weapon of mass destruction so lethal to the planet as the meat industry. Yet zero meat is required for a healthy diet, and two billion beings are savagely ripped limb from limb every single week in torture chambers far worse than anything devised by the Nazis.
- Morrissey
From which stars have we fallen to meet each other here?
—Friedrich Nietzsche
- Jacques Brel
"So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of being used or misused."
“
| — |
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
|
"Flesh was the reason oil paint was invented."
“
| — | Willem de Kooning |
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Culture is fundamental. Literature saves you. Cinema saves you.
—Léa Seydoux
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
“
| — | Susan Sontag |
“Eroticism is the thrilling desire to connect: to know, to explore, to penetrate, and to comprehend. When our lives are electrified by an erotic pulse, all existence becomes illuminated.” —Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
You’ve kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone…
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone…
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity
“
| — | Adrienne Rich, from Twenty-One Love Poems, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 (via lifeinpoetry) |
"The story of glamour is the story of human longing and its cultural manifestations. Like other forms of rhetoric and art, glamour can embody good ideas or bad ones. It can inspire life-enhancing actions or destructive ones. Its meaning and its effects depend on the audience. But one things is certain: glamour is not trivial."
- Virginia Postrel,
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