17 November 2014

When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lamppost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: “it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of Van Gogh’s it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *academical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.
And Van Gogh’s little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care.
"

— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit


16 November 2014

"I think people who vibrate at the same frequency, vibrate toward each other. They call it - in science - sympathetic vibrations."—
Erykah Badu


 

14 November 2014

"We think we understand the rules when we become adults
 but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination."

10 November 2014

"The Sound and the Light, in reality, are one. Vibrations up to a certain extent produce sound; but if their frequency is increased several-fold, they change into light. This Sound is the real and basic life-force which sustains the entire universe. This is the Light that lights our dark homes or bodies…..This Light is within all of us."

— Huzur Baba Sawan Singh

"If we’re not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?"



"Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that. Symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn’t see my mourning. Callous: all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you think you’re listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It’s on account of the sounds it is."

— James Joyce from Ulysses


Wake me the hell up.

An essential Murray principle: Wear your wisdom lightly, so insights arrive as punch lines. When pressed about his interactions with the public, he admits that the encounters are, to a certain extent, "selfish." Murray shifts his weight on the couch and explains, "My hope, always, is that it's going to wake me up. I'm only connected for seconds, minutes a day, sometimes. And suddenly, you go, ‘Holy cow, I've been asleep for two days. I've been doing things, but I'm just out.' If I see someone who's out cold on their feet, I'm going to try to wake that person up. It's what I'd want someone to do for me. Wake me the hell up and come back to the planet."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/being-bill-murray-20141028#ixzz3IhvbhgPx
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