You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a certain thing; wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you…. I know I have said a lot when I say ‘You can do anything you want to do.’ But I mean it… Blunder ahead with your personal view… The real work of art is the result of a magnificent struggle.

Painter Robert Henri from his book The Art Spirit

There are only 4 questions of value in life, Don Octavio:

What is sacred?
Of What is the spirit made?
What is worth Living for? and
What is worth Dying for?

The answer to each is the same: only Love!

Don Juan DeMarco to Don Octavio
in the film Don Juan DeMarco

To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself.

Soren Kierkegaard

Chess, which exists predominantly in two dimensions, is one of the world’s most difficult games. Three-dimensional chess is an invitation to insanity. But human relationships, even of the simplest order, are like a kind of four-dimensional chess, a game whose pieces and positions change subtly and inexorably between moves, whose players stare dumbly while their powerful positions deteriorate into hopeless predicaments and while improbable combinations suddenly become inevitable. To make matters worse, some games are open to any number of players, and all sides are expected to win.

Robert Grudin
From Time and the Art of Living

In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement, certainly. But still it is very bad and wrong, and demoralising. The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over peoples’ private lives seems to be quite extraordinary. The fact is that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesmanlike habits, supplies their demands…and what aggravates the mischief is that the journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists who write for what are called Society papers. The harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists who solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the private life of a great statesman, of a man who is the leader of political thought as he is a creator of political force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise authority in the matter, to give their views, and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into action, to dictate to the man on all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to his country; in fact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful. The private lives of men and women should not be told to the public. The public have nothing to do with them at all.

Oscar Wilde
extract from The Soul of Man Under Socialism, circa 1895

If you want to build a ship
don’t herd people together to collect wood
and don’t assign them tasks and work,
but rather teach them to long for the
endless immensity of the sea.

Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery