Brian > Brian's Quotes

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Faith: not wanting to know what the truth is.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Art is the proper task of life. ”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“. . . and what if I did drink too much? Whose business is that? Who knows how much I didn't drink?”
― William Kennedy, Ironweed

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.”
― Tristan Tzara

“You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry”
― Abraham Lincoln

“While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity,
heavily thickening to empire, I
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops
and sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make
fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Qut of the mother; and through the spring exultances,
ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life
is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than
mountains: shine, perishing republic.

But for my children. I would have them keep their dis-
tance from the thickening center; corruption.
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the
monster’s feet there are left the mountajns.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,
a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught
-–they say--God, when he walked on earth.”
― Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems

“Nature knows that people are a tide that swells and in time will ebb, and all their works dissolve ... As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves. We must unhumanize our views a little and become confident as the rock and ocean that we are made from.”
― Robinson Jeffers

“You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.”
― Robinson Jeffers

“Once, on ancient Earth, there was a human boy walking along a beach. There had just been a storm, and starfish had been scattered along the sands. The boy knew the fish would die, so he began to fling the fish to the sea. But every time he threw a starfish, another would wash ashore. "An old Earth man happened along and saw what the child was doing. He called out, 'Boy, what are you doing?' " 'Saving the starfish!' replied the boy. " 'But your attempts are useless, child! Every time you save one, another one returns, often the same one! You can't save them all, so why bother trying? Why does it matter, anyway?' called the old man. "The boy thought about this for a while, a starfish in his hand; he answered, "Well, it matters to this one." And then he flung the starfish into the welcoming sea.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Star Thrower

“If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure.”
― loren eiseley

“I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe: Masterpiece Essays on Nature, Philosophy, and the Human Condition

“I love forms beyond my own, and regret the borders between us”
― Loren Eiseley

“Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy upon earth except as it is to be found in the enlightenment of the spirit--some ability to have a perceptive rather than an exploitive relationship with his fellow creatures.”
― Loren Eiseley

“To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Night Country

“Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.”
― James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“When you approach something to photograph it, first be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. Then don't leave until you have captured its essence.”
― Minor White

“To get from the tangible to the intangible (which mature artists in any medium claim as part of their task) a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work "the mirror with a memory" as if it were a mirage, and the camera is a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor…. Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, substance and form [the photographer] can use the same to pursue poetic truth" (Minor White, Newhall, 281).”
― Minor White

“No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer it has chosen.”
― Minor White

“Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”
― W.E.B. DuBois

“Memory is the scribe of the soul”
― Aristotle

“Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods