Long Day’s Journey
“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you […]
ideas
That beast astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible
“I cannot understand what pleasures and joys they are that drive people to the overcrowded railways and hotels, into the packed cafés with the suffocating […]
When human beings are transformed into commodities, what can their conversation be but trivial?
Indeed, when human beings are transformed into commodities, what can their conversation be but trivial? Would commodities on the market, if they could speak, not […]
Their faith is not strong enough to believe in the fertile possibilities of man without shutting their eyes
The “realists” believe, of those who strive for kindness, that these latter mean well but that they are ingenuous, full of illusions—briefly, fools. And they […]
Intellectual yokel
A philosopher, which is what I am supposed to be, is a sort of intellectual yokel who gapes and stares at what sensible people take […]
The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind
I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. […]
… and it just doesn’t matter, we have not loved life.
“I have been photographing the United States trying by investigating photographically to learn who we are and how we feel, but seeing what we look […]
The artist is not born to a life of pleasure. He must not live idle.
It is very important for the artist to gauge his position aright, to realize that he has a duty to his art and to himself, […]
The neurotic and the artist
“The neurotic fails through incessant vacillation. The artist succeeds in giving shape and form to the conflict and ejects truth and beauty.” – Otto Rank […]
Beauty and Form
Aesthetics is usually defined as “a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of the beautiful and with judgments concerning beauty.” I recall the endurance […]
Vulnerable World
“One way of looking at human creativity is as a process of pulling balls out of a giant urn. The balls represent possible ideas, discoveries, […]
You’ve forgotten your childhood; It will make you suffer until you heed it
“In your case, mind and nature, consciousness and dream world lie very far apart. You’ve forgotten your childhood; it cries for you from the depths […]
Art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship
“… it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. […] Today the individual has become […]
Victor Frankl quotes
“I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is […]
You need not teach an acorn to grow into an oak tree
“You need not, and in fact cannot, teach an acorn to grow into an oak tree, but when given a chance, its intrinsic potentialities will […]
They Thought They Were Free
“One doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only […]
My attempts to adapt myself to the standardized world remain fruitless
“It may well be that my thinking of today is somewhat different from that of twenty years ago, but my feelings and my being, my […]
Quotes from A Life of One’s Own by Marion Milner
Some quotes I’ve collected from a book I’m reading, A Life of One’s Own, by Marion Milner. Certainly I had never suspected that the key […]
We’ll need writers who can remember freedom
This, I believe: Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can […]
Raw material for the artist
“A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have […]