ART-RELATED

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. .An artist is making something exist by observing it. .And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. -- William S. Burroughs

Take the ugliest object or subject and make it beautiful. Do not look for pictures in nature, get a problem. -- Charles Hawthorne, American Artist - 1872-1930

What else, I should like to know, have art and artists ever done, except to perceive the individual thing, isolate the object out of the welter of phenomena, elevate it, intensify it, inspire it and give it meaning. -- Thomas Mann (1875-1955)

My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life. -- Max Beckmann, German expressionist painter - (1884-1950)

CARS

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object. -- Roland Barthes (1915-1980) , French social and literary critic.

Ford Model A - At the car's first public showing in January, 1928 in New York's Madison Square Garden, police had to hold back the surging throng. Fifty thousand New Yorkers paid deposits on new Fords. The mob scenes were repeated in other major cities. .It was apparent that Ford had produced another winner. -- www.canadiandriver.com

I contend that a certain number of traffic accidents occur because all cars look alike nowadays. You go down the road and there's just a sea of jelly bean shapes that seem to all blend in. -- Jay Leno

In 1906 a car known as the Autocar was manufactured in the United States with a new invention-headlights (they burned kerosene). .The Autocar, however, lacked another important accessory, the steering wheel. .The driver directed the vehicle by means of a stick-like shaft situated to the right of the driver's seat.

In 1924 a Ford automobile cost $265.

Most American automobile horns beep in the key of F.

MISCELLANEOUS

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. .May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. -- Edward Abbey, naturalist and author (1927-1989)

BOOKS AND READING

I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. .It means to me now only that place where the books are kept. -- John Steinbeck

Reading is a means of thinking with another person's mind; it forces you to stretch your own. -- Charles Scribner, Jr.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, but to weigh and consider...Histories make men wise. -- Francis Bacon, English lawyer and philosopher, 1561-1626

In books we converse with the wise, as in action with fools. -- Francis Bacon, 1561-1626

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some to be chewed and digested. -- Francis Bacon, 1561-1626

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. .I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. .What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. -- Henry David Thoreau

Lord! .When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book. -- Christopher Morley

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries. -- René Descartes

When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. .They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind. -- Michel de Montaigne

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all -- Henry David Thoreau

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. -- Cicero

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library. -- Jorge Luis Borges, 1899-1986

Any book which is at all important should be reread immediately. -- Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher

Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of one's own. -- Arthur Schopenhauer

TRAVEL

A person needs at intervals to separate from family and companions and go to new places. .One must go without familiars in order to be open to influences, to change. -- Katharine Butler Hathaway

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. -- Henry Miller

Travelling is a brutality. .It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. .Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it. -- Cesar Pavese, Italian poet (1908-1950)

NATURE: GENERAL...MOUNTAINS...NIGHT...FLOWERS...LAKES...SNOW

Nature-General

I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough? -- Vincent Van Gogh

Flowers and trees and birds and stars and glaciers, and all the other wonderful things that surround us in the world. .We have all of this beauty around us and yet grown ups often lose themselves in offices and imagine they are doing very important things. .Can you recognize the flowers by their names and the birds by their singing? ... Young people, I hope you will take a long time growing up! -- Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) -- www.backyardnature.net

The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life. -- Robert Louis Stevenson

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Nature - Lakes

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Nature - Mountains

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Nature - Night - Evening - Twilight

Twilight drops her curtain down, and pins it with a star. -- Lucy Maud Montgomery

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery. -- Joseph Conrad

Night time is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep. -- Catherine O'Hara

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Nature - Flowers

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Nature: Snow

COMFORTING THOUGHTS ABOUT DEATH

Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

When it seems that our sorrow is too great to be borne, let us think of the great family of the heavy-hearted into which our grief has given us entrance, and inevitably, we will feel about us their arms and their understanding -- Helen Keller

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