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‘Expectations based on the work itself are the most useful tool you have. What you need to know about the next piece is contained in the last piece. The place to learn about your materials is in the last use of your materials. The place to learn about your execution is in your execution. The best information about what you love is in your last contact with what you love. Your work is your guide.’

‘Your job is to develop an imagination of the possible.’

‘Vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue.’

‘The student lamented to his teacher. “But I can hear the music so much better in my head than I can get out of my fingers.” To which the Master replied, “What makes you think that ever changes?”

‘Art is a high calling — fears are coincidental, sneaky and disruptive. Disguised as laziness, resistance to deadlines, irritation with materials or surroundings, distraction over the achievements of others — indeed as anything that keeps you from giving your work your best shot.’

‘Your job is to learn to work on your work.’

‘Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did.’

‘A place of beauty
has no owner.
So there is nothing
to spoil the pleasure.’

‘We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are ours; has it abysses, those belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.’ — Rilke

‘I feel like a small battlefield, in which the problems of our time are being fought out. All one can hope to do is to keep oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a battlefield. After all, the problems must be accomodated, have somewhere to struggle and come to rest and we, poor little humans, must put our inner space at their service and not run away.’

- Etty Hillesum

‘… The heavenly powers
Cannot do all things. It is the mortals
Who reach sooner into the abyss. So the turn is
With these. Long is
The time, but the true comes into
Its own.’
- Hölderin

Heidegger: ‘What threatens man in his very nature is the view that technological production puts the world in order, while in fact this ordering is precisely what levels every ordo, every rank, down to the uniformity of production, and thus from the onset destroys the realm from which any rank and recognition could possible arise.”

‘We often dismiss the disclosure of meaning as revealed in art as “mere play”—something to entertain us—rather than that which essentialy confronts us with the meaning of life and death. Instead of honoring the sacred silence revealed in the poetic image, we prefer rational concepts. We want easy answers and solutions rather than insights that leave us with a new reverence for the questions of life.’

‘We try to control love and human relationship through noisy small talk and gossip, which escalates through alcohol, rather than opening up ourselves to the surprise of genuine conversation, when we listen with awe to each other and to the silence of creation.’

‘Just as an individual can be hostage in the abyss of addiction, so can an entire epoch or culture. Western civilization is experiencing a Dark Night of the Soul due to our self-asserting will to control, epitomized by the technology that we expect to provide us with a secure, happy and comfortable life.’

‘The world is thus a multiplicity of objects of equal value. None plays any greater part in the whole machinery of the world than any other. If it is to become clear to us that this or that fact has greater significance than another, we must consult our thinking.’

‘Our thinking is not individual like our senses and feeling; it is universal. It receives an individual stamp in each separate human being only because it comes to be related to his individual feelings and sensations.’