A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. —Diane AirbusIf everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough. —Mario Andretti, Mario Andretti: A Driving Passion. By Gordon Kirby. St. Paul, MN: Motorbooks International, 2001

Be like a tree in pursuit of your cause.
Stand firm, grip hard, thrust upward.
Bend to the winds of heaven.
And learn tranquility.
—Memorial Dedication to forester Richard St. Barbe Baker

[Jake's excuses:] I ran outta gas. I had a flat tire. I didn't have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn't come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from outta town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake, a terrible flood, locusts. It wasn't my fault!! I swear to God! —John Landis, dir. The Blues Brothers. Universal Pictures, 1980.

At last I said, “How many ways are there to die in space?” “A million.” “Name some.” “The meteors hit you. The air goes out of your rocket. Or comets take you along with them. Concussion. Strangulation. Explosion. Centrifugal force. Too much acceleration. Too little. The heat, the cold, the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets, the asteroids, the planetoids, radiation….” “And do they bury you?” “They never find you.” “Where do you go?” “A billion miles away.” —Ray Bradbury, "The Rocket Man." In The Illustrated Man. New York: Doubleday, 1951.

Hey Sarge, look at this! I found these two accounting books. This one says “Show to the I.R.S.” And what’s the other one say? “NEVER show to the I.R.S.” —Mel Brooks, dir. The Producers. Embassy Pictures, 1967.

You can connect from all kinds of places--energetic harmony, sexual alchemy, intellectual alignment - but they won't sustain love over a lifetime. You need a thread that goes deeper, that moves below and beyond the shifting sands of compatibility. That thread is fascination—a genuine fascination with someone's inner world, the way the organize reality, the way they articulate their feelings, the unfathomable and bottomless depths of their being. To hear their soul cry out to you again and again, and to never lose interest in what it is trying to convey. If there is that, then there will still be love when the body sickens, when the sexuality fades, when the perfection projection is long shattered. If there is that, you will swim in love's waters until the very last breath. —Jeff Brown, An Uncommon Bond

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. —John Cage, Indeterminacy… Ninety Stories by John Cage (excerpt Story 75)

Once more into the fray,
Into the last good fight I'll ever know.
Live and die on this day.
Live and die on this day.
—Joe Carnahan, The Grey (2011)

Photography is not like painting,..There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever. —Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Washington Post in 1957

Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. —G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1909.

As paraphrased by Neil Gaiman in Coraline. New York: HarperCollins, 2002

Mongol General: Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good, but what is best in life?
Mongol: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair.
Mongol General: Wrong! Conan! What is best in life?
Conan: Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of their women.
Mongol General: That is good! That is good.
—John Milius, dir. Conan the Barbarian. Universal Pictures, 1982

Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine. —Lawrence Durrell, Clea, London: Faber and Faber, 1960I didn’t create Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan has always been here…always was. —Bob Dylan quoted in Rolling Stone in 1978 as requited by Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker, November 3, 2014

All of Narcissa’s instincts had been antipathetic to him, his idea was a threat and his presence a violation of the very depths of her nature, in the headlong violence of him she had been like a lily in a gale which rocked it to its roots in a sort of vacuum, without any actual laying-on of hands. And now the gale had gone on, the lily had forgotten it as its fury died away into the fading vibrations of old terrors and dreads, and the stalk recovered and the bell itself was untarnished save by the friction of its own petals. The gale is gone, and though the lily is sad a little with vibrations of ancient fears, it is not sorry. —William Faulkner, Flags In the Dust

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. —Fitzgerald, F. Scott. "The Crack-Up." Esquire, February 1936

.[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars. —Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

There is really nothing you must be.
And there is nothing you must do.
There is really nothing you must have.
And there is nothing you must know.
There is really nothing you must become.
However, it helps to understand that fire burns,
And when it rains, the earth gets wet.
—Buddhist Temple in Kyoto, Japan (retold by Robert Fulghum)

The Church says the body is a sin. Science says the body is a machine. Advertising says the body is a business. The body says: “I am a fiesta!” –Eduardo Galeano

When we enter into sacred texts as readers, rather than as worshippers—treating them, the way we might the Odyssey or “Beowulf,” as ancient vessels of meaning crafted by people who, like all writers, had their good moments and their misses—we gain much, but we lose much, too. We gain the freedom to read and roam for pleasure. But we forget at our peril that, through most of their history, these have been not books, to be appreciated, but truths, to be obeyed. —Adam Gopnik, "Sacred Arts or How to Read the Good Books," The New Yorker, January 21, 2019

Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather. —Bill Hicks

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. —Jung, C.G. Alchemical Studies (Vol. 13 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung). Princeton University Press, 1967.

Some people grumble that roses have thorns; I am grateful that thorns have roses. —Alphonse Karr, A Tour Round My Garden, 1855I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. —Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

I’ve so often been struck by the difference between a society that believes wisdom is part of the fabric of a community, and that it is best represented in the words and actions of particular people (elders), and a society that believes wisdom is only to be found in certain people. The difference for a community would be the difference between choosing to act heroically as a group or waiting for a hero to act. —Lopez, Barry H. Lopez, Horizon

The challenge in addressing the utility of our dreams is not whether to reject them outright in an effort to privilege the sort of logical truth the rational mind offers us. It’s to picture a conversation between imagination imagination and intellect, one that might produce an advantageous vision, one the intellect itself cannot discern and which the imagination alone is not able to create. —Barry H. Lopez, Horizon

The loneliest people can be the kindest. The saddest people sometimes smile the brightest. The most damaged people are filled with wisdom. All because they do not wish the pain they’ve endured on another soul. —Louis Malle, dir. Damage. Universal Pictures, 1992

Some people have a way with words, and other people...oh, uh, not have way. —Steve Martin

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
—Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock," Ladies of the Canyon. Reprise Records, 1970

Each tree grows in two directions at once, into the darkness and out to the light with as many branches and roots as it needs to embody its wild desires. – John O’DonohueMost people want to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch. ~Robert Orben, as quoted in The Reader's Digest, 1986

Laughter is far more sacred than prayer, because prayer can be done by any one; it does not require much intelligence. Laughter requires intelligence, it requires presence of mind, a quickness of seeing into things….To be able to laugh, you need to be like a child - egoless. And when you laugh, suddenly laughter is there, you are not. You come back when the laughter is gone….Laugh so that your whole body, your whole being becomes involved, and suddenly there will be a glimpse. For the moment the past disappears, the future, the ego, everything disappears - there is only laughter. And in that moment of laughter you will be able to see the whole existence of laughter [the wholeness of man]….”—Osho, “

Existence is a cosmic joke.” The Times of India, August 1, 2012

You’re not how much money you’ve got in the bank. You’re not your job. You’re not your family, and you’re not who you tell yourself… You’re not your name… You’re not your problems… You’re not your age… You are not your hopes… You will not be saved… We are all going to die, someday… What will you wish you’d done before you died? —Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Advice is what you get when the person you’re talking with about something horrible and complicated wishes you would just shut up and go away. Advice is what you get when the person you are talking to wants to revel in the superiority of his or her own intelligence. If you weren’t so stupid, after all, you wouldn’t have your stupid problems...Genuine conversation is exploration, articulation and strategizing. When you’re involved in a genuine conversation, you’re listening, and talking—but mostly listening. Listening is paying attention. It’s amazing what people will tell you if you listen. Sometimes if you listen to people they will even tell you what’s wrong with them. Sometimes they will even tell you how they plan to fix it. Sometimes that helps you fix something wrong with yourself. —Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life

He fell in love with Manhattan’s skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. —Arthur Phillips, The Song Is You: A Novel

Hold on to what is good
even if it is
a handful of earth.
Hold on to what you believe
even if it is
a tree which stands by itself.
Hold on to what you must do
even if it is
a long way from here.
Hold on to life even when
it is easier letting go.
Hold on to my hand even when
I have gone away from you.
—Pueblo Indian Prayer

A farmer finds a magic lamp and a genie appears, offering to grant him one wish. The farmer, filled with envy, says, "My neighbor has a cow. I don't have a cow. I wish my neighbor's cow dies." —Russian Proverb

Lawyers are all right, I guess—but it doesn't appeal to me,' I said. 'I mean they're all right if they go around saving innocent guys' lives all the time, and like that, but you don't do that kind of stuff if you're a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides. Even if you did go around saving guys' lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys' lives, or because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in the dirty movies? How would you know you weren't being a phony? The trouble is, you wouldn't. —J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

We need Shakespeare now because the kind of vision he offers counters some of the forces of individualistic capitalism that embraces one person’s well-being at the expense of another’s, It’s the lack of generosity. When human interactions are reduced to mere contractual relations, they fail, they’re inadequate. —Regina Schwartz, professor of English, Northwestern University

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it. —David Sedaris, Naked. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997"Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo." (The Devil is wise, not because he is the Devil, but because he is old.) —Spanish Proverb

To step into a boxing ring, a fighter must convince himself that several things he knows to be true are, in fact, false. He must convince himself that the blows he sustains to his brain will not do irreparable damage and that the accretion of these blows will not, eventually, destroy him, as it has so many others. He must convince himself that his opponent is not altogether human, because otherwise how do you strike someone toward whom you bear no ill will, and strike him not just for show but savagely, to hurt him? Above all, he must convince himself that what goes on inside the ring and what goes on outside it are separate matters entirely, that the one has no relation to the other. And he can have no doubt, because doubt breeds hesitation, and in the ring, hesitation can be deadly. —Jacob Stern, "Can a Boxer Return to the Ring After Killing?," The Atlantic, November 18, 2021

Each of you is perfect the way you are ... and you can use a little improvement. —Shunryu Suzuki

Hazards are one of the main causes of accidents. —U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration booklet

It’s a basic truth that Jack knows: if you’re dragged out of your bed by the cops at four in the morning and they want to talk to you about the Kennedy assassination, the Lindbergh kidnapping or aiding and abetting freaking Pontius Pilate, what you do is you keep your fucking mouth shut. Doesn’t matter if they ask you your height, your favorite color or what you had for breakfast that morning, you keep your fucking mouth shut. If they ask you if night is darker than day, or whether up is higher than down, you keep your fucking mouth shut. There are four words, and only four words, you can say. I want my lawyer. When your lawyer gets there he’ll give you some sage advice. He’ll tell you to keep your fucking mouth shut. — Don Winslow, California Fire and Life

Listen again to the opening of “Black Dog,” or to Plant’s forlorn wail at the start of “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” or Page’s fingers in full flow in “No Quarter,” or the violent precision of Bonham’s beat in “When the Levee Breaks.” It’s like listening to atheism: the charge is still there, ready to be picked up, ready to release lives. The anti-religious religious power of rock was exactly what my mother feared. I don’t think it was the obvious mimicry of religious worship—the sweaty congregants, the stairways to Heaven, and all the rest of it—that worried her. I think she feared rock’s inversion of religious power: the insidious power to enter one’s soul. —James Woods, “Good Times, Bad Times.” The New Yorker, January 31, 2022