All my films were made against the desires of the audience because they aim at truth and beauty rather than the spectator's satisfaction. […] [These days] producers just want to make money, they are like drug peddlers.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it's your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.

— Charles Bukowski

You will hear thunder and remember me and think: She always wanted storms.

— Anna Akhmatova

He was like a sound amplified by a mountain echo. The traveller is small, but the mountains are great, and suddenly they merge into a single whole. Such was Yuri Gagarin. [...] To accomplish a heroic exploit means to step beyond one's own sense of self-preservation, to have the courage to dare what today seems unthinkable for the majority. And to be ready to pay for it. For the hero himself, his feat is the limit of all possibilities. If he leaves something "in reserve", then the most courageous deed thereby moves into the category of work: hard, worthy of all glorification, but — work. An act of heroism is always a breakthrough into the Great Unknown. Even given most accurate preliminary calculations, man enters into that enterprise as if blindfold, full of inner tension and ready for any outcome.

— Valentina Malmy

This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.

— David Lynch

Hans Haacke | Germania | 1993

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

— Oscar Wilde

Every mouth you've ever kissed was just practice. All the bodies you've ever undressed and ploughed in to were preparing you for me. I don't mind tasting them in the memory of your mouth. Was it a long journey? Did it take you long to find me? You're here now, welcome home.

— Warsan Shire

Sometimes you've got to be able to listen to yourself and be okay with no one else understanding.

— Christopher Barzak

I feel I've done my part. I think I contributed something, in whatever way I did. I'm at peace in that respect.

— Manuel Álvarez Bravo

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

— Paul Valery

Yoko Ono

Never create based upon what you think other people might like. Create because you like it.

— André Supa

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

— John Green

When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only: What are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out?

— Bertrand Russell

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.

— Jonathan Ive

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

— David Foster Wallace

Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.

— Robert Hayden

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; while working at Haus Esters, about 1927/28.

Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another's world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.

— Bill Bullard