Lisbon

"Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I'm nobody, absolutely nobody."

- Fernando Pessoa
 

 

 

Paris

"Such a huge Paris! It would take a lifetime to explore it again. This Paris, to which I alone had the key, hardly lends itself to a tour, even with the best of intentions; it is a Paris that has to be lived, that has to be experienced each day in a thousand different forms of torture, a Paris that grows inside you like a cancer, and grows and grows until you are eaten away by it."

- Henry Miller

Amsterdam

"I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day."

- Vincent van Gogh 

New York

"It is no easier, I’m convinced, to make a good painting than to find a diamond or a pearl; it requires effort, and you stake your life as a dealer or an artist on it. So once you have good stones, it’s important not to lack faith in yourself....There are no more good paintings than there are diamonds. "

― Vincent van Gogh 

Returning to Laughter

 
Since everything is but an apparition, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter.
― Longchenpa 

Zen 49

 
Every work is or ought to be a statement about the unknown.
― Fritz Winter

Fritz Winter Approaches the Unknown

Winter Journal

"To set down such choice experiences that my own writings may inspire me - and at last I may make wholes of parts. Certainly it is a distinct profession to rescue from oblivion and to fix the sentiments and thoughts which visit all men more or less generally. That the contemplation of the unfinished picture may suggest its harmonious completion. Associate reverently and as much as you can with your loftiest thoughts. Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg - by the side of which more will be laid. Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame - in which more may be developed and exhibited. Perhaps this is the main value of a habit of writing - of keeping a journal.  That so we remember our best hours - and stimulate ourselves. My thoughts are my company - they have a certain individuality and separate existence - aye personality. Having by chance recorded a few disconnected thoughts and then brought them into juxtaposition they suggest a whole new field in which it was possible to labor and to think. Thought begat thought."

H.D. Thoreau, Winter Journal, January 22, 1852