INSANITY In individuals is rare; but in groups, nations & epochs it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
You need a little bit of insanity to do great things. Henry Rollins
The personal ego already has a strong element of dysfunction but the collective ego is frequently even more dysfunctional to the point of absolute insanity. Eckhart Tolle
For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic.
Normal means a lack of imagination — lack of creativity. Jean Dubuffet
INSANITY — a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world. R.D.Laing
The wisdom of life consists the elimination of non-essentials. Lin Yurang
Our worst fears like our greatest hopes are not outside our powers and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter. Marcel Proust
TO LIVE is the rarest thing in the world. most people exist that is all. Oscar Wilde
John Updike: I am left with the sad possibility that women who suit me sexually are necessarily crazy.
Balin Miller 24 fell to death scaling El Capitan was someone who liked to “live on the dangerous side.” Balin Miller: “Everyone should experience real fear & danger at some point which is easily done in the mountains. I think it would help a lot of people become less stressed over more frivolous problems.”
This is a subtle truth. Whatever you love, you are. Rumi
Fear is the main source of superstition & one of the main sources of cruelty.
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. Bertrand Russell
HAPPINESS is not about having everything you want
but loving what you have. Charlotte Chopin 102
In wisdom gathered over time
I have found that very experience
is a form of exploration. Ansel Adams
WHEN ANGELS VISIT US, we do not hear the rustle of wings,
nor feel the feathery touch of the breast of a dove; Mary Baker Eddy
but we know their presence by the love they create in our hearts.
WE are more powerful when we empower each other.
“Fascist Esthetics” The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets.” Susan Sontag
To think is easy,
to act is hard.
But the hardest thing
in the world is to act
in accordance with your thinking. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Alexander Calder: “Our only hope is in thoughtful Man. Reason is not treason.”
Calder took hold of life and shook it, in his last years, and when the occasion called for a supreme effort. he was ready. The last weeks of Calder’s life were spent at his daughter’s house in an atmosphere of universal jubilation.
“Robert Redford has never been so radiantly glamorous,” the critic Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker, ” as when we saw him through Barbra Streisand’s infatuated eyes.”
“I was born with a hard eye. The way I saw things I would see what was wrong. I could see what could be better. I developed kind of a dark view of life, looking at my own country.”
Claudia Cardinale: “You can learn beauty. Visconti taught me how to be beautiful. He taught me to cultivate mystery, without which, he said, there cannot be real beauty.”
“Conveying a sense of interiority that is quite palpable . . .”
“There was something free about Claudia, a strong personality that would never be tamed. She was strongly independent.” nyt 9/24/25
To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be. Miguel de Unamuno
Pico Iyer on Thomas Pynchon: “Expand our sense of possibility & leave us unsure of everything we thought we knew.”
Letters are the great fixative of experience. Time erodes feeling. Time creates indifference. Letters prove to us that we once cared. Janet Malcolm
It is neither wealth nor splendor but tranquility & occupation
which give you happiness. Thomas Jefferson.
Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of “melodies that ascend and leap and pierce into deeps of infinite time.”
Albert Murray was produced by another age
in which intelligence expressed itself in ardor.
Flannery O’connor’s satirical, sarcastic eye.
HOPE IS AN ANCHOR FOR THE SOUL.