A Selection of Quotes

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT (1884-1962)

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

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ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879 -1955) American Physicist

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.

If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.

If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies… It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for insects as well as for the stars. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance.

Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.

I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Long hair minimizes the need for barbers; socks can be done without; one leather jacket solves the coat problem for many years; suspenders are superfluous.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

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PABLO PICASSO (1881 -1973) Spanish Painter

The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.

Action is the foundational key to all success.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephantand the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.

It is my misfortune – and probably my delight – to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don’t go with the basket of fruit!… I put all the things I like into my pictures. The things – so much the worse for them. They just have to put up with it.

The older you get the stronger the wind gets – and it’s always in your face.

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VINCENT VAN GOGH (1853-1890) Dutch Painter:

If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.

As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

Happiness… it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?

I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

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M.C. ESCHER (1898-1972) Dutch Artist:

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it’s in my basement… let me go upstairs and check.

Are you really sure that a floor can’t also be a ceiling?

He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.

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T.S. ELLIOT (1889-1965) Author:

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

At twenty you have many desires which hide the truth, but beyond forty there are only real and fragile truths -your abilities and your failings.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

In my end is my beginning.

It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

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SALVADOR DALI (1904-1989) Spanish Surrealist painter:

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.

I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiacthought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to thetotal discrediting of the world of reality.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

Let my enemies devour each other.

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JACKSON POLLOCK (1912-1956) American Abstract Expressionist painter:

“When I am painting I have a general notion as to what I am about. I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.”

“New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements … the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.”

[A canvas is] “an arena in which to act.”

“Every good artist paints what he is.”

“I’m very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you’re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.”

“The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.”

“Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.”

“Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.”

“The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.”

“It [abstract art] should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed – after a while you may like it or you may not.”

In response to the question “How do you know when you’re finished?”, Pollock replied “How do you know when you’re finished making love?”

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QUOTES FROM OUR FINLAND AUTHOR

There are no great things, only small things with great love. Happy are those.
- Mother Theresa (1910-1997 )

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948 )…

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
- Voltaire (1694-1778 )

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

I am not young enough to know everything.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

women are not made to be understood,but to be loved.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

If God can create a stone too heavy for Him to lift, there is something he cannot do;
and if He cannot create a stone too heavy for him to lift, there is something He cannot create.
If there’s something God cannot do He is not omnipotent, and if there’s something He cannot create.
He is not omnipotent. Therefore God is not omnipotent.
- Elementary Symbolic Logic, 2nd Ed. Gustason & Ulrich.

The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.
- Brian Eno/Peter Schimidt – Obligue Strategies

In a full heart there is room for everything and in an empty heart there is room for nothing.
-Antonio Porchia

And finally my favorites:

Humans were designed to be happy, creative and in harmony with the universe at all the time…
To be in a permanent state of natural ecstasy, living in right here, right now.
- Unknown?

It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.
- Walt Disney (1901-1966)