Gratitude is the inward feeling of kindness received. Thankfulness is the natural impulse to express that feeling. Thanksgiving is the following of that impulse.
–Henry Van Dyke
Category Archives: Quotes
A Challenge
Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.
–Pablo Picasso
Well, he certainly was confident! And while I won’t make art daily after AEM ends, I plan to continue filling my own blank wall space. It really does bring satisfaction to see evidence of my own creativity.
Better Dead
It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.
–Dame Rose Macaulay
Hee! I’m a bit of a reading snob, I suppose, because I think serial mysteries and romances fall into this classification. There are actually occasions when such a book is desireable, even a slightly sinful indulgence. My “I like time better dead” author used to be Lawrence Sanders many years ago. More recently it has been Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta mysteries with a little Jonathan Kellerman thrown in. Some people like chicklit, others like romance or adventure or science fiction. What’s your genre for killing time?
Simply Look
Simply look with perceptive eyes at the world about you, and trust to your own reactions and convictions. Ask yourself: “Does this subject move me to feel, think and dream? Can I visualize a print — my own personal statement of what I feel and want to convey — from the subject before me?”
–Ansel Adams
What Is Drawing?
I do wish I could get ahold of this book! Alas, only in Britain…
What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How is one to get through that wall — since pounding at it is of no use? In my opinion one has to undermine that wall, filing through it steadily and patiently.
What I try to acquire is not to draw a hand but the gesture, not a mathematically correct head, but the general expression… In short, life.
[via Janey’s Journey]
Contributing
Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.
–Alfred Hitchcock
It Doesn’t Matter
It doesn’t matter if you’ve been drawing for a day or a decade, or how technically good your artwork is. If you value making pictures as a way to express yourself, then you are an artist, and what you draw is art.
–Helen South
Not Unless
There is never enough time, unless you’re serving it.
–Malcolm Forbes
Where Wisdom Begins
Disappointment and loss are a part of every life. Many times we can put them behind us and get on with the rest of our lives. But not everything is amenable to this approach. Some things are too big or too deep to do this, and we will have to leave important parts of ourselves behind if we treat them in this way. These are the places where wisdom begins to grow in us. It begins with suffering that we do not avoid or rationalize or put behind us. It starts with the realization that our loss, whatever it is, has become a part of us and has altered our lives so profoundly that we cannot go back to the way it was before.
–Rachel Naomi Remen
Whatever
Whatever your life’s pursuit — art, poetry, sculpture, music, whatever your occupation may be — you can be as spiritual as clergy, always living a life of praise.
–Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan, Bowl of Saki
Something About the Actual Moment
There was something about the actual moment that the flimsy-looking wheels left earth, seeing the space between ground and the craft itself enlarge, that dazzled him, filled him with a sense he could never have described, not in the language of his mother and father or in the language of his schoolmates; it was a wordless, wild, tremendous, unbearably physical release of tension that left him almost in tears.
–Louise Erdich, The Master Butchers Singing Club
A Chance to Redeem
It is the rare person who, looking back over his life and seeing what he has done to it, hasn’t sighed for a chance to redeem what he has cheaply used or carelessly ruined. If only somehow, somewhere, there was a way to live again the days we have darkened with our blind haste – the innumerable occasions when our indifference trod on all the pearls of GodÂ’s graciousness; the times when our pride, or our fear, or our meanness poured the acid of contempt over the fair countenance of anotherÂ’s soul! If this grace were ours, how we would leap to the chance!
–Samuel Howard Miller
Surprise of Surprises
If faith is trust in the giver, hope is openness for surprise. The surprise of surprises is God within us.
–David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer
Mind of a Bigot
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.
–Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Which Ones
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
–Scott Adams
Look at Every Path
Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question… Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.
–don Juan Matus
[via Whiskey River]
So Moving
I just have to post these three lines here, because they are so moving — even haunting — to me. The entire piece is a treat of images and metaphors that radiate with a daughter’s love for her mother.
She was the daughter of broken hearts and the mother of unbroken daughters.
She was a dream I had as a child that took me decades to wake up from.
She was an emerald, brilliant, flawed, a tragic mess of perfection.–La Peregrina, Santiago Dreaming: Writing Love Letters in the Sand
About Life and Death
I have always believed that death does not end a relationship (mentioned in “I Never Sang for My Father”) and that the honoring of our dead is important for our own quality of living. Death not only does not end a relationship, but as I said yesterday, we must periodically learn to “dance with it.” Am I scared of dying? Yes, I am, but I no longer hide from it as I once did. Day of the Dead has that childish, fun quality of spoofing death, teasing it, to take the fear out of it. All my extremely conservative Dutch relatives are probably squirming in their graves right now protesting their inclusion in a custom they probably would find pagan, but I’d rather think they are happy to be remembered this week.
–Fran Pullara, Sacred Ordinary: Day of the Dead is About Life
Falls to Pieces
The whole argument about whether one believes in God falls to pieces if you change the question to: do you believe in yourself? If you don’t psychologise it, don’t interpret it as meaning “do you have self-confidence?” but just take it literally, you’d have to say yes, even if you’ve won the top prize for the person with the least self-belief ever to have existed. Because you exist, whether or not you or others believe in you. The same may be true of God.
You can read her 15th interview with God. This in an astonishing series of communications with Self and Mystery. Natalie’s artistry awes me, and I don’t use that term often.
Achingly, Beautifully Said
What it feels like, though, is that two people I love are throwing something sacred away. It’s not that I have some great idea about a Jesus-sanctioned union, but I do know what it’s like to be alone. I know how hard it is to be the only person who is responsible for taking the car to get its oil changed, for cooking breakfast, for mowing the yard. I know it’s hard, sometimes, to come home to a dark house.
Alternately, I know we are always essentially alone, in the dark hours of the soul, and to think that a spouse will make that go away is mere fantasy. I know that a spouse is not a panacea for all that ails the lonely beast, and if one has those expectations, one is going to be desperately disappointed. I know that it’s hard to still face those disappointments and keep getting up every day and making the coffee, to keep smelling the bad breath of the one who hasn’t healed you, to keep putting up with the moody tantrums of someone who refuses to fix the garage door. I know we like to think that marriage should have something to do with who you “love” or with whom you sleep. Maybe it does, in the beginning. But then there is the middle. And the end, in which neither of those things matter.
But I think you give your word when you get married. You give your word that you’re going to hang on through that, and that you’re not going to leave, and that you’re going to go to put up with your mother-in-law. You give your word that you will do every last thing you can possibly do to co-exist with this person, including making any number of sacrifices you never would have made otherwise.
You do that because if there is anything holy in this world, it is the gift of another human being who is willing to bind himself or herself to your sorry ass. You make that vow so that someone will be morally obligated to pick you up at the mechanic’s. You make that vow so there is someone else to fill out the paperwork when you have an abscessed tooth. You make that vow so that you will not have to stand alone in the pew at your father’s funeral.
It feels to me that if you have been given that gift, and it dies from neglect or squander, you make me want to puke. In your face.
[via Santiago Dreaming]