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Quotes

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood – it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.

Martin Luther King Junior

Much Madness is divinest Sense —
To a discerning Eye —
Much Sense — the starkest Madness —
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail —
Assent — and you are sane —
Demur — you’re straightway dangerous —
And handled with a Chain —

Emily Dickinson in Much Madness is divinest Sense

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that— but you are the only you.

Neil Gaiman

In traditional Japanese culture, there’s an attitude towards artists that’s like, “You’re able to do something you like, so isn’t that enough?” This viewpoint leaves those involved in artistic expression in a tough situation. Because it’s not true. We can’t continue doing it unless it’s a business.

Tamiyo Kusakari

Take the chances a traveler has to take. In the end you will be so much richer, so much stronger, so much clearer, so much happier, and so much better a person that all the risk and hardship will seem like nothing compared to the knowledge and wisdom you will have gained.

Ken Nerburn in the book Simple Truths (via lucybossert)

My friend, Lucy and her partner Colin are traveling around America working on Organic Farms and blogging about it. You should follow them.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Henry David Thoreau in Walden

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget
how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou (1928 – 2014)

Derive happiness from yourself, from a good day’s work, from the clearing that it makes in the fog that surrounds us. Think that all those who have succeeded,remembering the difficulties of their beginnings, exclaim with conviction; “those were the good old days.” For most of them: Success = Prison. And the artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist must never be a prisoner of [one’s] self, prisoner of a style, prisoner of a reputation, prisoner of a success, etc … Didn’t the Goncourt brothers write that Japanese arts of the great period changed their names several times during their lives? I like that: they wanted to protect their freedoms.

– Henri Matisse in Mattisse On Art: Revised Edition by Jack Flam (University of California Press, 1995)