Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What’s left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.
All artforms are in the service of the greatest of all arts: the art of living.
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.
Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’
In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.
In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer.
To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.
But I remember to sense where I am. To sense my feet in the grass and the cool night on my skin. I look up at the dark line of trees and the fireflies flickering at the base of them, and the stars dimly emerging overhead and the moonlit trees all around me, and instead of jokes or stories this time I say out loud that I think this place is already heaven, and everybody in it is already an angel, and we’re here in heaven to make heaven a better place for the other angels.
I’ve come to believe that a lot of what’s wrong with the Internet has to do with memory. The Internet somehow contrives to remember too much and too little at the same time, and it maps poorly on our concepts of how memory should work.
The trick to being truly creative, I’ve always maintained, is to be completely unselfconscious. To resist the urge to self-censor. To not-give-a-shit what anybody thinks. That’s why children are so good at it. And why people with Volkswagens, and mortgages, Personal Equity Plans and matching Lois Vutton luggage are not.
Man is born crying. When he has cried enough, he dies.
The loop is a signature of our times, whether in musical beats or GIFS. The loop is repetition, over and over again in the now.
If we give the impression that creativity is the sole domain of the creative industries, why are we surprised when it is considered irrelevant to everyone else?
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Isn’t that a beautiful description of the web?
Interviewer - Suppose your house were on fire and you could remove only one thing. What would you take?
Jean Cocteau - I would take the fire.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
Things that don’t last, last longer.
For someone with so much relationship advice, you seem awfully alone.
Find 3 sites that inspire you.
Steal the layout from one, color scheme from another, and typography from the third.
Combine those three, and you’ll realize you’ve created something original.
Nationalism didn’t exist in Europe until the Renaissance, when typography enabled every literate man to see his mother tongue analytically as a uniform entity. The printing press, by spreading mass-produced books and printed matter across Europe, turned the vernacular regional languages of the day into uniform closed systems of national languages — just another variant of what we call mass media — and gave birth to the entire concept of nationalism.