From the series Be Careful of Things Left Behind by Nigel Grimmer

via Toys with Fragile Feelings – Alice @ My Modern Metr

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

—Carl Sagan

When we are most affected by the arts, whether through participation or observation, we experience the sublime…

During these moments, we are not thinking; in fact, we are most empty of our thoughts. All of our attention focuses on the present moment.

Artists and scientists both, that allow themselves to dwell in these moments of mental stillness, often begin to feel a larger interconnection with all things around them—their sense of self begins to fade.

In a very deep sense, creativity and the sublime, through the arts and sometimes through the sciences, act as a gateway towards a depth within ourselves.

- Jeff Lieberman
on Arresting Stillness: A Photographic Art at Integral Life
(click through for the full quote)

And that was my moment of awareness: that woman across the court who did not know me, and whom I did not know, was a person. She had thoughts of her own. She was. Our lives would never touch. I would never know her name. And yet it was she who revealed to me my first glimpse of personhood.

- Madeleine L’Engle

via Echo-location
(where you can read this snippet in greater context.)

“With a team of two assistants, Bolin paints onto his clothes and then spends hours positioning himself in front of backdrops until he’s virtually invisible.”

-MyModernMet

“In my work, the artist is hiding to restore his strength and to protect himself. I want my viewers to experience China as I know it, where the concept of artists as human beings was once neglected.”

-Liu Bolin

via My Modern Metropolis

I tend to think that there’s an element of music that cannot be captured. Life cannot be captured. Human heart cannot be captured. The moment of creation itself is fleeting.

Parker Wilson
(played by Richard Gere)
in the movie Hachi

The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to the peak, not the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages.

Look To Windward
by Iain M. Banks
300

When you are interiorly free you call others to freedom, whether you know it or not. Freedom attracts wherever it appears. A free man or a free woman creates a space where others feel safe and want to dwell. Our world is so full of conditions, demands, requirements, and obligations that we often wonder what is expected of us. But when we meet a truly free person, there are no expectations, only an invitation to reach into ourselves and discover there our own freedom.

Henri Nouwen

Insanity is wasting your life as a nothing when you have the blood of a killer flowing in your veins. Insanity is being shit on, beat down, coasting through life on a miserable existence when you have a caged lion locked inside and the key to release it.

Morgan Freeman as Sloan in Wanted

“We travel too, of course, with our own capacity to touch, and to bless. Hands connected to eyes that see and ears that hear are no small thing; they can even change the world…or at least a life or two.”

Joel on Vagablogging
(Click to read the full post)