Surely there is grandeur in knowing that in the realm of thought, at least, you are without a chain; that you have the right to explore all heights and depth; that there are no walls nor fences, nor prohibited places, nor sacred corners in all the vast expanse of thought.
Robert Green Ingersoll
There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings, are.
None may teach it anything,
'T is the seal, despair,
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.
When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 't is like the distance
On the look of death.
There's A Certain Slant of Light by Emily Dickenson
Photo taken 9 November 2007
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see.
~ Anaïs Nin
Posted 16 June 2007
In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime.
~André Gide
*Photograph courtesy of my sister - St. George, Bermuda.
Posted 2 June 2007
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
~George Santayana
Posted 5 May 2007
When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.
~Thomas Paine
Posted 19 May 2007
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
~ Albert Einstein
Posted 28 April 2007
Negligence is the rust of the soul, that corrodes through all her best resolves.
~ Owen Feltham
Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul.
~Mark Twain
posted: 24 March 2007
He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.
- Harold Wilson
Posted: 10 March 2007
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
~ (possibly) Benjamin Franklin
Posted 24 February 2007
Never open the door to the lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.
~Baltasar Gracian
Posted 10 February 2007
A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
- Susan Sontag
3 February 2007
Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.
~William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar, Act II Scene II
Posted 3 March 2007
And oftentimes excusing of a fault
Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse,
As patches set upon a little breach
Discredit more in hiding of the fault
Than did the fault before it was so patched.
~ William Shakespeare
The true color of life is the color of the body, the color of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest color of the unpublished blood.
~ Alice Meynall
One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.
-Kahlil Gibran
Posted 4 February 2006
I should fear those that dance before me now
Would one day stamp upon me: 't has been done;
Men shut their doors against a setting sun.
-William Shakespeare
Photo taken 5 November 2005
Brooklyn, New York
In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.
- Ernst Fischer
11 June 2005
One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
28 May 2005
She hated bleak and wintry things alone.
All that was warm and quick, she loved too well -
A light, a flame, a heart against her own;
It is forever bitter cold, in Hell.
- Dorothy Parker
Tombstones in the Starlight: The Pretty Lady
19 February 2005
I wish that everyone would realize that until recently beauty in things was commonplace and that it is our responsibility to demand that of the future.
-Sōetsu Yanagi
05 March 2005
Everyone looks at things, but people do not perceive in the same manner.
Some are able to penetrate into the depths of things,
but most see only the surface, and the objects are usually categorized as right or wrong.
To misapprehend is no better than not to notice.
-Sōetsu Yanagi
26.12.05
To "see" is to go direct to the core; to know the facts about an object of beauty is to go around the periphery.
-Sōetsu Yanagi
29 January 2005
He who only knows, without seeing, does not understand the mystery.
Even should every detail of beauty be accounted for by the intellect, does such a tabulation lead to beauty?
Is the beauty that can be neatly reckoned really profound?
-Sōetsu Yanagi
12 March 2005
To divine the significance of pattern is the same as to understand beauty itself.
-Sōetsu Yanagi
26 March 2005
In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create the distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.
- Buddha
05 February 2005
A man of intuition is one capable of always deriving fresh impressions from objects.
Intuition is the power of seeing at this very moment.
-Sōetsu Yanagi
15 January 2005
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn no traveller returns...
22 January 2005
Cemetery gates. St Patrick's Old Cathedral. Mulberry Street.
“All it requires for the forces of evil, bigotry, superstition and ignorance to keep their grip on the minds of the people is that good men and women continue to do nothing.”
-Voltaire
