Category: collection

Truman Capote: “Any Love is Natural and Beautiful”

Photographers Unknown, Any Love is Natural and Beautiful

“Any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

Erik Pevernagie: “A Fleeting Moment Can Become an Eternity”

Photographers Unknown, Faces of Man: WP Photo Set One

“A fleeting moment can become an eternity. From a past encounter everything may disappear in the dungeon of forgetfulness. A few furtive flashes or innocent twinkles can survive, though. Some immaterial details may remain marked in our memory, forever. A significant look, a salient colour or a unforeseen gesture may abide, indelibly engraved in our mind.”
― Erik Pevernagie

 

John Steinbeck: “And Then- The Glory. . .”

Photogaphers Unknown, And Then–The Glory

“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then -the glory- so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. ”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Joseph Campbell, “Forms and Conceptions . . .”

Photographers Unknown, Forms and Conceptions

“The function of ritual and myth is to make possible, and then to facilitate, the jump—by analogy. Forms and conceptions that the mind and its senses can comprehend are presented and arranged in such a way as to suggest a truth or openness beyond. And then, the conditions for meditation having been provided, the individual is left alone. Myth is but the penultimate; the ultimate is openness—that void, or being, beyond the categories —into which the mind must plunge alone and be dissolved. Therefore, God and the gods are only convenient means—themselves of the nature of the world of names and forms, though eloquent of, and ultimately conducive to, the ineffable. They are mere symbols to move and awaken the mind, and to call it past themselves.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Hermann Hesse: “We Who Bore the Mark…”

 

Photographers Unknown, We Who Bore the Mark

“We who bore the mark might well be considered by the rest of the world as strange, even as insane and dangerous. We had awoken, or were awakening, and we were striving for an ever perfect state of wakefulness, whereas the ambition and quest for happiness of the others consisted of linking their opinions, ideals, and duties, their life and happiness, ever more closely with those of the herd. They, too, strove; they, too showed signs of strength and greatness. But as we saw it, whereas we marked men represented Nature’s determination to create something new, individual, and forward-looking, the others lived in the determination to stay the same.”

—Hermann Hesse, Damian, Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

John Steinbeck: “Our Species is the Only Creative Species”

Photographers Unknown, Our Species is the Only Creative Species

“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.” 

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden

John Steinbeck: “The Gods Are Fallen and All Safety Gone”

Nineteen Men: The Black and White Collection

“When a child first catches adults out — when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just — his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”

–John Steinbeck, East of Eden

 

Valery Bryusov: “A Sweet Whirling of Ecstasy”

Photographers Unknown, Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Seven

“If there exist fortunate people, if from time to time the wild sun of joy soars towards foreign lands in a sweet whirling of ecstasy — then where are the words which might tell of this? And if in the world there exists a beauty for enchantment, then how might one describe it?”

― Valery Bryusov