If you’re like me, you draw inspiration from the words of masters or experts from a variety of realms - be it philosophy (greatly represented below in this post), music, math, quantum physics, art, writing - really anything. While this list (arranged in alphabetical order) begins with a photographer, there are surprisingly few photographers referenced. Here, I present to you a growing list of words that inspire and guide me to be a better version of myself.
Furthermore, when I admire someone’s work in their respective domain, I’m eager to know more about their own sources of inspiration and influence. How I would love to be able to browse their bookshelves, music collections/playlists, or to see the stamps on their passports!
Perhaps it’s presumptuous to imagine that my work may inspire anyone or that anyone would care to read about my sources of inspiration, but if for no other reason, I write this as an homage to these creative minds.
This post will be a little different in that I’m solely presenting other peoples’ words, rather than my own. I will also add to it over time.
Disclaimers:
I do not necessarily endorse all of the actions or beliefs of the individuals referenced below, but rather their quotes mentioned in this post. I respectfully invite you to make your own opinions and evaluations on these individuals (some more controversial than others), and will provide links to their respective Wikipedia pages for you to conveniently do so if you desire.
Moreover, if these people were somehow able to meet together, I suspect there would be heated and passionate debate, even disdain. What a delight it would be to hear their arguments!
I’m aware that women are under-represented in this list. This was certainly not intentional and has prompted reflection on my part. More will certainly be added as we go…
Without further ado, the good stuff (in alphabetical order by author):
“There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.”
“There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.”
“The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.”
“I know some photographs that are extraodrinary in their power and conviction, but it is difficult in photography to overcome the superficial power or subject; the concept and statement must be quite convincing in themselves to win over a dramatic and compelling subject situation.”
“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”
“Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.”
“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
“In all my work, what I try to say is that as human beings, we are more alike than we are unalike.”
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.”
“Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.”
“If our children are to approve of themselves, they must see that we approve of ourselves.”
“You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.”
“Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.”
“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
“Remind yourself what you've been through and what you've had the strength to endure.”
"Let each thing you would do, say, or intend, be like that of a dying person."
“Think of yourself as dead, you have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly.”
“You're better off not giving the small things more time than they deserve.”
"The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see.”
“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
“Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”
“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”
“I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.”
“Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.”
“I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.”
“Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.”
“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.”
“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
“I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.”
“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you.”
“Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”
“I don't have to agree with you to like you or respect you.”
“If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.”
“Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom...is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.”
“No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American.”
“Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don't have.”
“Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.”
“I've long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we're talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime 'associates,' food, for me, has always been an adventure.”
“When I die, I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted and advantages squandered.”
“Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.”
“All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.”
“You would think that a rock star being married to a supermodel would be one of the greatest things in the world. It is.”
“I’m always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don’t even take what I am seriously.”
“The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.”
“I’m just an individual who doesn’t feel that I need to have somebody qualify my work in any particular way. I’m working for me.”
“I’m an early riser. I get up between five and six, have coffee, and read for a couple of hours before everyone else gets up.”
“Opportunity dances with those already on the dancefloor.”
“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”
"We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."
“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
“Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?”
“The problem is, we look for someone to grow old together, while the secret is to find someone to stay a child with.”
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
“You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.”
“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.”
“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”
“A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.”
“Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should?”
“Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing.”
“We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole.”
"I don't do fashion. I am fashion."
"Fashion is architecture, it is a matter of proportions."
"If a woman is poorly dressed, you notice her dress, but if she's impeccably dressed, you notice the woman."
“Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”
“It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.”
“Don't play what's there; play what's not there.”
“Do not fear mistakes - there are none.”
“Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery.”
“My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life.”
“Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.”
“If you sacrifice your art because of some woman, or some man, or for some color, or for some wealth, you can't be trusted.”
“I always listen to what I can leave out.”
“Time isn't the main thing. It's the only thing.”
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit.”
"It is not that I'm so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer."
"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”
"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."
"Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living."
“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity."
“Never regard your study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn the liberating beauty of the intellect for your own personal joy and for the profit of the community to which your later work will belong.”
“We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.”
“We can't solve today's problems with the mentality that created them.”
“Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience. You need experience to gain wisdom.”
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”
"Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile."
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
"Whoever is careless with truth in small matters cannot be trusted in important affairs."
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”
“He who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing.”
“Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.”
“It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.”
“Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.”
"The market doesn't influence my thinking in the slightest, except l'd suspect anything that makes it. I love Bartok, Berg, Stravinsky. The fact that music is polytonal, atonal, polyrythmic or whatever doesn't bother me - but it must say something. I work with very simple means because l'm a simple person, and I came from a simple tradition out of dance music and jobbing, and though l've sort of studied a lot of other music, I feel that I know my limitations and I try to work within them. Really there's no limit to the expression I could make within the idiom if I had the inner need to say something.”
“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.”
"Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible."
“The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction the weight, the weight we carry is love. Who can deny? The burden of life is love, but we carry the weight wearily, and so must rest in the arms of love at last, must rest in the arms of love. No rest without love, no sleep without dreams of love--be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines, the final wish is love.”
“You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.”
“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”
“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.”
“Quiet people have the loudest minds.”
“Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.“
“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”
“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up.”
"The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough."
“When people talk, listen completely. Don't be thinking what you're going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe.”
“There is nothing noble in being superior to some other man. True nobility is in being superior to your former self.”
“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special, too.”
"Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure."
“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.”
“It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.”
“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
"My philosophy is: What people say about me is none of my business. I am who I am and do what I do. I expect nothing and accept everything. And that makes life easier. We live in a world where funerals are more important than the deceased, marriage is more important than love, looks are more important than the soul. We live in a packaging culture that despises content."
“Today is the tomorrow I was worried about yesterday.”
“The greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.”
"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm."
"Experience is not what happens, to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him."
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”
“It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.”
“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice."
“Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.”
“The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.”
“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle.”
“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
“You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.”
“Where your fear is, there your task is.”
"The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are."
"No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you."
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment - and especially on their children - than the unlived life of the parent.”
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have.”
“What labels me, negates me.”
"To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person."
"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
"To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities."
"Mistakes are always forgivable if one has the courage to admit them."
"Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own."
"Simplicity is the key to brilliance."
"A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer."
"Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do."
"It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential."
"All types of knowledge, ultimately mean self-knowledge."
"The more we value things, the less we value ourselves."
"Don't fear failure. — Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts, it is glorious even to fail."
"Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water."
"Do not allow negative thoughts to enter your mind for they are the weeds that strangle confidence."
“I learned that just beneath the surface there's another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn't find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force...a wild pain and decay...also accompanies everything."
“Negativity is the enemy of creativity.”
“The piano ain't got no wrong notes.”
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
“A genius is the one most like himself.”
“You've been making the wrong mistakes.”
“The loudest noise in the world is silence.”
“I've always believed in numbers and the equations and logics that lead to reason. But after a lifetime of such pursuits, I ask, "What truly is logic? Who decides reason?" My quest has taken me through the physical, the metaphysical, the delusional -- and back. And I have made the most important discovery of my career, the most important discovery of my life: It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reasons can be found.”
“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
“Anyone who fights with monsters should make sure that he does not in the process become a monster himself. And when you look for a long time into an abyss, the abyss also looks into.”
“I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.”
"All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."
"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."
"The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away."
“It took me my whole life to learn to draw like a child.”
“I do not seek, I find.”
“Everything you can imagine is real.”
“I do not evolve, I am. There is, in art, neither past, nor future. Art that is not in the present will never be.”
“We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”
“Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist.”
“None of us are getting out of here alive, so please stop treating yourself like an after-thought. Eat the delicious food. Walk in the sunshine. Jump in the ocean. Say the truth that you're carrying in your heart like hidden treasure. Be silly. Be kind. Be weird. There's no time for anything else.“
“I hope you're proud of yourself for the times you've said "yes," when all it meant was extra work for you and was seemingly helpful only to someone else.”
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”
“Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.”
“Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me.”
“If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.”
“In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.”
“Forgiveness is a strange thing. It can sometimes be easier to forgive our enemies than our friends. It can be hardest of all to forgive people we love. Like all of life's important coping skills, the ability to forgive and the capacity to let go of resentments most likely take root very early in our lives.”
“The connections we make in the course of a life--maybe that's what heaven is.”
"Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact our drama: art's most profound moments express this frustration. When they were abandoned as untenable superstitions, art sank into melancholy."
“No commentary can explain painting. All explanations must come from a completed experience of the experience between the painting and its observer. The appreciation of art is truly a marriage of intelligences. And art is also a marriage, and if it is not completed properly, then it is barren."
“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”
“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
“A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”
“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.”
“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
“Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.”
“It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”
“A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.”
“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.”
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
"This is the true joy in life, to be used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, to be a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and that as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live, I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me, it is a sort of splendid torch which l've got a hold of for a moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."
"People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it."
“You can't help it. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.”
“What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.”
“I'll tell you what Freedom is to me. No fear.”
“You have to learn to get up from the table when love is no longer being served.”
“You only go around once, but if you play your cards right, once is enough.”
“Fear is the enemy of logic. There is no more debilitating, crushing, self-defeating, sickening thing in the world–to an individual or to a nation.”
“The big lesson in life, baby, is never be scared of anyone or anything.”
“I'm gonna live till I die.”
“Don’t hide your scars. They make you who you are.”
“I believe in you and me. I'm like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life -- in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God. But I don't believe in a personal God to whom I look for comfort or for a natural on the next roll of the dice.”
“Cock your hats, angles are attitudes.”
"We are all one. Only egos, beliefs, and fears separate us."
“Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.”
“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
“Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible.”
““If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.”
“It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.”
“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human."
“Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow.“
“Go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.“
"Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz."
"The idea is not to live forever, it is to create something that will."
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
“Create your own style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.”
“People respond well to those that are sure of what they want.”
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