“The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination”
―
travel
Fellows, a photograph
“Only when a person reaches old age can he stop caring about the opinions of his fellows, or of the public, or of the future.”
– Milan Kundera
Floods, a photograph
“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”
– Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Life, a photograph
“It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.” – Aldous Huxley
Cheap medicine, a photograph
“Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine.”
― George Gordon Byron
Technological sublime, a photograph
“For thousands of years, it had been nature–and its supposed creator–that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.
But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs…. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.”
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Reds, a photograph of Rome
“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Yellows, a photograph of Roma
“Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music.
And death a note unsaid.”
― Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems
No matter what, a photograph
“No matter what happens, always keep your childhood innocence. It’s the most important thing.”
― Federico Fellini
People, a photograph
“Religion. It’s given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.”
― Jon Stewart
Strange contrasts, A photograph of Rome
“It is a place that ‘grows upon you’ every day. There seems to be always something to find out in it. There are the most extraordinary alleys and by-ways to walk about in. You can lose your way (what a comfort that is, when you are idle!) twenty times a day if you like; and turn up again, under the most unexpected and surprising difficulties. It abounds in the strangest contrasts; things that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent, delightful, and offensive, break upon the view at every turn.”
― Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy
The Beginning, A Photograph of Rome
“Tell me about
your Italian journey
I am not ashamed
I wept in that country
beauty touched me
I was a child once more
in the womb of that country
I wept
I am not ashamed
I have tried to return to paradise”
― Tadeusz Różewicz, They Came to See a Poet: Selected Poems
Naïveté, A Photograph
“Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.”
― Steve Martin
Fire, A Photograph
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
Gustav Mahler
The Slip, A Photograph
“What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
The Pioneer, A Photograph
“Do whatever you do intensely. The artist is the man who leaves the crowd and goes pioneering. With him there is an idea which is his life.”
― Robert Henri
dear Sir, A Photograph of Solitude
“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away… and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast…. be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. […] who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust…. and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Bird of Space, A Photograph
“For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.”
― Kahlil Gibran
Foreign Elements, A Photograph of Kyoto, Japan
“..we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide.”
Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
Imagination, A Photograph of Art
“No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.”
– Edward Hopper
Myth, A Photograph
“I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?”
– John Lennon
Old & Young, A Photograph
“I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuffed with the stuff that is coarse, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine, one of the nation, of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest”
― Walt Whitman
Time, A Photograph
“This is the greatest consolation in life. In poetically well-built museums, formed from the heart’s compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.”
– Orhan Pamuk
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Inside Man, Street Photography
“It’s not the men in your life that matters, it’s the life in your men.”
– Mae West
Actualities
“With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities.”
– Alain de Botton
Mystic
“hark, now hear the sailors cry,
smell the sea, and feel the sky
let your soul & spirit fly, into the mystic…”
– Van Morrison
The World
“In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce.”
– W.B. Yeats
Chef’s Salads
“People aren’t either wicked or noble. They’re like chef’s salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.”
– Lemony Snicket
Earth with Robert Francis
I follow Plato only with my mind
Pure beauty strikes me as a little thin
A little cold, however beautiful.
I am in love with what is mixed and impure
Doubtful, dark and hard to disencumber
I want beauty I must dig for, search for.
Pure beauty is beginning and not end
Begin with the sun and drop from sun to cloud
From cloud to tree, and from tree to earth itself
And deeper yet to the earth dark root.
I am in love with what resists my loving
With what I have to labor to make live.
– Robert Francis
Empire, A Photograph
“Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they too, fade away.”
– Milan Kundera
One Street Shy 