Art > Art's Quotes

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
― Gospel of Thomas

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”
― C.G. Jung

“Though no one notices at the time, in-loveness obliterates the humanity of the beloved. One does a curious kind of insult to another by falling in love with him, for we are really looking at our own projection of God, not at the other person. If two people are in love, they tread on star dust for a time and live happily ever after—that is so long as this experience of divinity has obliterated time for them. Only when they come down to earth do they have to look at each other realistically and only then does the possibility of mature love exist. If one person is in love and the other not, the cooler one is likely to say, "We would have something better between us if you would look at me rather than at your image of me.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.”
― Richard Dawkins

“Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. ”
― Oscar Wilde

“Color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.”
― Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art

“It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.”
― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“All you need is already within you, only you must approach your self with reverence and love. Self-condemnation and self-distrust are grievous errors. Your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of love you bear for your self, all I plead with you is this: make love of your self perfect. Deny yourself nothing -- glue your self infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them; you are beyond.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj

“It has nothing to do with effort. Just turn away, look between the thoughts, rather than at the thoughts. When you happen to walk in a crowd, you do not fight every man you meet, you just find your way between. When you fight, you invite a fight. But when you do not resist, you meet no resistance. When you refuse to play the game, you are out of it.”
― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Truth is not a reward for good behaviour, nor a prize for passing some tests. It cannot be brought about. It is the primary, the unborn, the ancient source of all that is. You are eligible because you are. You need not merit truth. It is your own....Stand still, be quiet.”
― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Suffering will only stop, not when God answers your prayers, but when you awaken to the truth of your own Being.”
― Robert Adams, Silence Of The Heart

“Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.”
― John Donne, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose

“Love gives value to the one who loves
and not to the loved one.”
― Tatjana Ostojic, Cacophony of My Soul: When Love Becomes Poetry

“Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs--what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?”
― Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

“The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

“These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one”
― Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

“It's always night, or we wouldn't need light.”
― Thelonious Monk

“No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . ."
"And?"
"No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all, Teddy said. It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.”
― J.D. Salinger

“materialism is a fantasy. It’s based on unnecessary postulates, circular reasoning and selective consideration of evidence and data. Materialism is by no stretch of the imagination a scientific conclusion, but merely a metaphysical opinion that helps some people interpret scientific conclusions.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“Only nothing is true.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

“Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest." William Gaddis, The Recognitions.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Although relatively speaking the right hemisphere takes a more pessimistic view of the self, it is also more realistic about it.457 There is evidence that (a) those who are somewhat depressed are more realistic, including in self-evaluation; and, see above, that (b) depression is (often) a condition of relative hemisphere asymmetry, favouring the right hemisphere.458 Even schizophrenics have more insight into their condition in proportion to the degree that they have depressive symptoms.459 The evidence is that this is not because insight makes you depressed, but because being depressed gives you insight.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“When you don’t follow your nature there is a hole in the universe where you were supposed to be.”
― Dane Rudhyar

“Cyclic knowledge is mind — knowledge — however vast and encompassing the mind may be. It is structural knowledge. It is only one mode of knowing; but this mode is all-important in situations where disorder, confusion, and emotional biases prevail. It does not take the place of direct experience, whether at the personal or the spiritual level; but it enables the experiencer to place his experience in a frame of reference which reveals their eonic significance — i.e. the function they occupy within the entire life-span.”
― Dane Rudhyar, Occult Preparations for a New Age

“Astrology is a Language. If you understand this language, The Sky Speaks to You.”
― Dane Rudhyar, A Handbook for the Humanistic Astrologer

“From a process-oriented point of view, we can best understand the birth-chart—the map of the heavens drawn for the exact time and place of a person's first breath—if we picture it as a stop-motion snapshot of a moment in the flow of the life of the cosmos. It is, as it were, a slice of celestial space-time as seen from planet Earth. The whole past of celestial motion is behind and implied in the particular planetary, zodiacal, house and aspect pattern appearing at the moment of our birth. And implied in both its totality and each of its parts is dynamic momentum, that is, an inexorable continuation of motion toward a future unfoldment. A birth-chart is thus a celestial statement of where the universe 'is', and therefore what it needs next, at the moment of our birth.”
― Dane Rudhyar, Astrological Aspects: A Process Oriented Approach