In relations with people, as in art, if you always stick to style, manners, and what will work, and you're never caught off guard, then some beautiful experiences never happen.

Helen Frankenthaler

Art is our weapon. Culture is a form of resistance

Shirin Neshat

Poetry has nothing to do with words, but it needs them.

Etel Adnan

If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.

Toni Morrison

This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod 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 as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what 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 I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

George Bernard Shaw

If we make money the object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily men; if we make technical skill the object of education, we may possess artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools—intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it—this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. On this foundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man mistake the means of living for the object of life.

W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Talented Tenth"

To see, we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.

Claude Monet

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

I feel that even if aesthetics is established as a science, it doesn’t affect me as an artist. I’ve done quite a bit of work in ornithology; I have never met an ornithologist who ever thought that ornithology was for the birds.” Later he would hone this sentiment into the single sentence: “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds.

Barnett Newman

Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.

Milton Glaser

The disciplinary barriers are impenetrable. If these barriers in education were to vanish, the architect as benevolent dictator would vanish too. Instead students could arm themselves with useful tools and knowledge with which they could assist a community.

Tom Woolley

There is no way to revive old forms, or to rework old forms, because the artist is never going to understand them well enough to do first grade work. So, if you want to rework Matisse, you’ll just be a bad Matisse, that’s all. There’s nothing to be gained by that. So, in order to do work comparable to Matisse, for example, you have to invent as much as Matisse did.

Donald Judd

Humanity i love you because you would rather black the boots of success than enquire whose soul dangles from his watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both parties and because you unflinchingly applaud all songs containing the words country home and mother when sung at the old howard Humanity i love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink and when you’re flush pride keeps you from the pawn shop and because you are continually committing nuisances but more especially in your own house Humanity i love you because you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it’s there and sitting down on it and because you are forever making poems in the lap of death Humanity i hate you

E.E. Cummings, Humanity I Love You (1925)

Actually it's stupid to love mankind, nothing but a heap of egoism (and we are a part of it too). But I love it anyway. I love its meanness, its banality, its dullness, its cheap contentment, and its oh-so-very-rare heroism. But in spite of this, every single person is a unique event, as if he had just fallen from a star.

Max Beckmann, Creative Credo (1920)

It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.

Jackson Pollock

It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.

Jean-Luc Godard

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: 'It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.'

Jim Jarmusch