If you add a quotation, please credit the originator. No orphaned quotations unless it is an actual anonymous one.





"Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." - Lisette Model

"They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum." - Tallulah Bankhead

"Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be." - Michel de Montaigne

"Fashion is general. Style is individual." - Edna Woolman Chase

"How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct." - Benjamin Disraeli

"Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better." - George Santayana

"The most sophisticated people I know - inside they are all children." - Jim Henson

"I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers."  - Mahatma Gandhi

"There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality." - Pablo Picasso

"It's not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic, too. You have to create rules." - Eric A. Burns

"You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist." - Isaac Asimov

"When you're going through hell - keep going." - Winston Churchhill

"Children are all foreigners." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines." - R. Buckminster Fuller

"Most fashion photography is done by gay people finding women sexy," Teller says, "which is sort of not sexy at all, at least to a heterosexual man. She's so retouched, so airbrushed, without any human response at all, and, well, you don't really want to fuck a doll."
- Juergen Teller

"I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it." - Pablo Picasso

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"If you dress as if you just rolled out of bed, then just stay in bed." -Tim Gunn

"Fashion is an instant language." -Miuccia Prada

"It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great." - Havelock Ellis

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Krishnamurti

"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know." - Diane Arbus

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months." - Oscar Wilde

"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it." - Ellen Goodman

"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious."  - Brendan Gill

"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist."  - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience." - John Cage

"A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor." - Ring Lardner

"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side." - James Baldwin

"There's a difference between f***able and bookable." - Christian Behr

"The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet." - William Gibson

"Art is science made clear." - Jean Cocteau

"The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head." - Jean Cocteau, Journey to Freedom (1969)

"Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled." - Michael Crichton

"I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time." - Orson Welles

"If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?" - Laurence J. Peter

"Boss, to be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble." - Zorba The Greek

"Sometimes what's right isn't as important as what's profitable." - Trey Parker and Matt Stone

"Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons."
  - R. Buckminster Fuller

"Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better." - Andre Gide

"Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself - and thus make yourself indispensable." - Andre Gide

"Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it." - Andre Gide

"An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous." - Henry Ford

"If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done." - Peter Ustinov

"If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time." - Edith Wharton

"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures." - Daniel Webster

"I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts." - Mark Twain

"The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous." - Shana Alexander

"Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious." - Peter Ustinov

"The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection." - Bertrand Russell

"The truth is more important than the facts." - Frank Lloyd Wright

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay

"I got kicked out of ballet class because I pulled a groin muscle. It wasn't mine." - Rita Rudner

"No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible." - WH Auden

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months." - Andrew Bolton

"The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything." - Walter Bagehot

"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something." - Robert Heinlein

"We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action." - Frank Tibolt

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." - George Orwell

"There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible." - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table." - Henry James

"If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey." - John Ruskin

"Look, I don't care what you say about me but making fun of alien technology is just stupid." -Joe Garelli

"Dare to be yourself." - Andre Gide

"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not." - Andre Gide

"It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves." - Andre Gide

"Obtain from yourself all that makes complaining useless. No longer implore from others what you yourself can obtain." - Andre Gide

"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." - Andre Gide

"So long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity." - Andre Gide

"The most decisive actions of our life - I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future - are, more often than not, unconsidered." - Andre Gide

"There are admirable potentialities in every human being. Believe in your strength and your youth. Learn to repeat endlessly to yourself, 'It all depends on me.'" - Andre Gide

"Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change." - Andre Gide

"Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble." - Samuel Johnson

"You've got to take the bitter with the sour." - Samuel Goldwyn

"There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have." - Don Herold

"When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice." - Marquis de la Grange

"There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth." - Agnes Repplier

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

"Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it's not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eye." - John Ford

"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company." - Gian Vincenzo Gravina

"Most advances in science come when a person for one reason or another is forced to change fields." - Peter Borden

"What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to." - Hansell B. Duckett

"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."  - Robert Hughes

"You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play." - Warren Beatty

"There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Someone's boring me. I think it's me." - Dylan Thomas

"People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest." - Hermann Hesse

"Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out." - Samuel Johnson

"Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war." - Thucydides

"Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes." - Norman Douglas

"If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

"The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about." - Oscar Wilde

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds" - Albert Einstein

"Someplace between apathy and anarchy is the Stance of the Thinking Human Being." - Rod Serling

"Into this wild abyss the wary fiend Stood on the brink of hell and looked a while, pondering his voyage..." - John Milton, "Paradise Lost"

"It took a long time to figure out that people talking to one another, instead of simply uploading badly-scanned photos of their cats, would be a useful pattern." - Clay Shirky

"We've come this far. Let's not ruin it by thinking." - Clint Eastwood

"A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

"We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong." - Sir Arthur Eddington

Joseph Campbell discussing James Joyce on the subject of art: """Art that moves you to desire is pornography. The Supreme Court of the United States can't define pornography, therefore, that's what we have. All advertising art is pornographic. You are going through a magazine and you see a picture of a beautiful refrigerator and beside it stands a lovely girl with lovely refrigerator teeth. And you think, I love refrigerators like that. Pornography. Picture of a dear old lady and you think, "Oh, lovely old sweet soul, I'd love to have a cup of tea with that dear lady." That's pornography. You go into a ski buffs department and you see pictures of ski slopes and you think, "oh, wow, to go down slopes like that." Pornography.
You get it? It has to do with a relationship to the object that's that of social, physical or otherwise action. You are not held in aesthetic arrest. Wow. What a picture. You get the point?"""

"Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems." - Rene Descartes

"Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art." - Tom Stoppard

"Women should be obscene and not heard." - Groucho Marx



"The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time." - George Bernard Shaw

"Never give a party if you will be the most interesting person there." - Mickey Friedman

"Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows." - David T. Wolf

"I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed." - James Thurber

"I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is." - Charles Lamb

"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world." - Lily Tomlin

"If you want to be successful, it's just this simple: Know what you're doing. Love what you're doing. And believe in what you're doing." - Will Rogers

"Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious." - Peter Ustinov

"A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts." - Colette

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." - Jack London

"Artists to my mind are the real architects of change and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact." - William S. Burroughs

"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand." - Bertrand Russell

"A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art." - George Bernard Shaw

"I make my films because I like to tell lies, to imagine fairy-tales, to tell about what I have seen and people I have met. I mostly like to tell about myself. So, that, in a way, I make my films relating episodes in my life, so frankly that I am even a gossip, and I may even, sometimes, cause uneasiness with my confessions, profuse and most likely unasked for." - Federico Fellini

"Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions." - Coco Channel

"It's not 'Who you know' ... it is 'Who knows you.'" - Eadie Levy

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." - Kurt Vonnegut

"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes." - Henry David Thoreau

"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

"Everyone is not entitled to their opinion. Everyone is entitled to an informed opinion." - Harlan Ellison

“I never cared for fashion much, amusing little seams and witty little pleats: it was the girls I liked." - David Bailey

"You're assisting the audience to understand; you're giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don't give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it's almost more pure. It's a cooler thing." - Jim Henson

"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream, it takes over as the number one hormone; it bosses the enzymes; directs the pineal gland; plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to film is more film." - Frank Capra

"Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it's not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eye." - John Ford

"Art is the signature of civilizations." - Beverly Sills

"Art is too serious to be taken seriously." - Ad Reinhardt

"One eye sees, the other feels." - Paul Klee

"Art is a revolt against fate." - Andre Malraux

"Art is the most beautiful of all lies." - Claude Debussy

"The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist." - Novalis

"The best artists know what to leave out." - Charles de Lint

"Life is short, the art long." - Hippocrates

"The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart." - George Sand

"I am always interested in what we miss when we try to focus" - Peter Doig

"Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad." - Salvador Dali

"Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials." - Lin Yutang

"Every artist writes his own autobiography." - Henry Ellis

"The great artist is a slave to his ideals." - Christian Nestell Bovee

"Art is the queen of all sciences "communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world." - Leonardo da Vinci

"I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream." - Vincent Van Gogh

"A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong." - Orson Welles

"In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves." - Robert Bulwer-Lytton

"What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit." - John Updike

"The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding." - Leonardo da Vinci

"To begin, begin." - William Wordsworth

"An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original." - Jean Cocteau

"Less is only more where more is no good." - Frank Lloyd Wright

"Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist." - Marshall McLuhan

"I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind." - William Butler Yeats

"Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead." - W. H. Auden

"The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel." - Piet Mondrian

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." - Albert Einstein

"An artist's failures are as valuable as his successes.. by misjudging one thing he conforms something else, even if at the time he does not know what that something else is." - Bridget Riley

"We are all motivated by a keen desire for praise and the better a man is, the more he is inspired by glory." - Cicero

"The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible." - Jean Kerr

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death." - Joan D. Vinge

"Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it." - Laurence J. Peter

"Of course we had our techniques, and we had directors that focused on technique, but the fact is characters and story got to come first. A lot of these young folks today, they have so much of this technology thing going for them they forget to make a movie, tell a story, create a world." - John Ford

"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them." - Bill Vaughan

"History never repeats itself but it rhymes." - Mark Twain

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" - Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." - Billy Wilder

"If you have any doubts that we live in a society controlled by men, try reading down the index of contributors to a volume of quotations, looking for women's names." - Elaine Gill

"In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right." - Ellen Goodman

"The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well." - Horace Walpole

"The secret of being a bore is to tell everything." - Voltaire

"If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough" - Mario Andretti

here are some collected from MM:
(including two of my own :-P )

"'If you give somebody a critique i think you need to be able to back it up somehow, especially when you do it in a definitive negative way.  Sorry but i did not see your book backing up your critique.' This is classic ad hominem genetic fallacy! In case you don't know what that means: its when you attack the person's credibility, or value it more than, his actually argument. This usually reveals an utter lack of credibility for oneself or one's work." - LighthousePhoto (actual name?)

"There's nothing more fashionable than being comfortable in your own skin." - Richard Goldstein

"When you do a double take, thinking something about a model is makeup and it turns out to be their real face and it is beautiful, that is the "exotic" I look for.
Sofia Loren is exotic, Djaimon Honsu is exotic, Yvonne De Carlo was exotic.
They have sculpturally breathtaking features that really would shock the kind of person who never leaves their hometown, but even people who get around are surprised when they first see these people. Exotic must be elegant in form, and exotic must be breathtakingly rare. For me, that is." - Charles Beckwith

"An editorial tells a story, argues a point, focuses on an issue. Like a written editorial, a photographic editorial expresses a position on an idea. It is an editorial comment, a note from the artist or editor or publisher. Someone is communicating an idea through the images." - Charles Beckwith

"Models are an image of themselves; actors are everyone but themselves." - PaulBPC (actual name?)





"The rule of 16 in full accuracy: The aperture is set to 16, the speed of the sensor/film is the speed one sets to the shutter. This is true for the two (2) modifiers. (1). You must be at or close to sea level. At 5 to 6 thousand feet you will GAIN 2/3 stop MORE light. (2). In winter time you will LOOSE 2/3 stop of light from that of summer time.

This is the fully expanded RULE OF 16. You will find it amazingly accurate. By the way, pollution in cities in America will drop light between 2/10 to 4/10 stop of light.

More over, one of the big killers of landscape photography, photosynthesis will suck out from one to 2.5 stops of light that neither digital camera meters nor quality light meters can sense. In close work, in amoung large trees in the landscape, a light meter on board of digital gear (film also of course) or in one’s hand are total useless. (Note Ansel Adams in the basic series guide makes reference to this)." - Tim Summa

"Within fashion the portrayal of women is about the power of woman. in glamour it's about the power of men. ancient fertility idols were rotund. since the 1960's with women seeking identities beyond that of a site of biological production so the dominant fashion aesthetic has been the twiggyesque, androgynous slim angular model. attitude and posing essentially flows from this. if fashion poses look 'awkward' to you op it may be because this is not how you wish to see women and that essentially you'd rather portray their 'roundness', their t&a, their subservience, their being there for you as wife/mother/whore." - David Richardson

Slow day?

"The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit."  Maugham

All the same, I like good quotes, and keep a file of my favorites.

"I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the
electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will
have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics,
and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to
comprehend and control them." -- Ansel Adams, in "The Negative", 1981


"Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice
until they don't get it wrong!" -- anon

" The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance."

I can't be the only fool running around the Internet saving art/photo/philosophy quotations to a text file on my desktop, right?

No, I do too:

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
Francis Bacon

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.
Charles Baudelaire

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.
Charles Baudelaire

"Dear heavens..why don't you try shooting pretty pics for National Geographic or puzzle pictures..wouldn't that be fun?"
~~Mom 2009

"If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it's already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer."
~~ Eve Arnold (1912-)

"Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical."
~~ Sophia Loren

"Any photographer who says he's not a voyeur
is either stupid or a liar."
~~Helmut Newton, 1995

Oh, good ones!

" if two people work on something in a half assed manner,
doesn't that constitute a full ass?"

~~ Nick Cassway,  1997ish
www.dissentia.com

"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."- Frank Zappa

"Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time."- H.L. Mencken

HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY !! HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY !! HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY JOY !!!!

Ched... 2009

"Spend your years wisely and you'll have less regrets to cash in at the end"
- Janice Marie Foote

"Any photographer who says he's not a voyeur is either stupid or a liar."

- Helmut Newton, 1995

(from Phil's profile page..)

"If you want a CD, I will gladly give you a CD....    of Michael Bolton songs." – PYPI when models ask for CD's.

Here's one about the art of flying:

"A good landing is one you walk away from. A great landing is one you taxi away from."
     - unknown

"A bad dancer blames his balls for getting in the way"

my grouchy, gramps... though i'm sure he didn't invent it...

"It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it's too late." W. Somerset Maugham

If you need something to do I got plenty of images I need help editing with and so on. I got dizzy just looking at all the OP wrote, I feel sorry for anyone who actually took the time to read it.

"Comedy is YOU falling down a flight of stairs, tragedy is ME knicking myself while shavin." - Charlie Chaplin

"A person of few words if a wise person and gains the respect of many" - Martin Luther King Jr.

"It is better to be seen in action than to speak loudy in words" - Babe Ruth

"If one is too busy talking then someone else is having to do that person's work" - Clint Eastwood

"The fewer the words, the more that gets achieved" - Ron Howard

"People who tend to talk too much never achieve anything in life worth talking about" - Michaelangelo

Sorry its a long one but the only one I can find right now on my horribly disorganized laptop.

"This was that which gave the first rise to this Essay concerning the understanding. For I thought that the first step towards satisfying several inquiries the mind of man was very apt to run into, was, to take a survey of our own understandings, examine our own powers, and see to what things they were adapted. Till that was done I suspected we began at the wong end, and in vain sought for satisfaction in a quiet and sure possession of truths that most concerned us, while we let loose our thoughts into the vast ocean of Being; as if all that boundless extent were the natural and undoubted possession of our understandings, wherein there was nothing exempt from its decisions, or that escaped its comprehension. Thus men, extending their inquiries beyond their capacities, and letting their thoughts wander into those depths where they can find no sure footing, it is no wonder that they raise questions and multiply disputes, which, never coming to any clear resolution, are proper only to continue and increase their doubts, and to confirm them at last in perfect scepticism." ...(And here comes my favorite part.)... "Whereas, were the capacities of our understandings well considered, the extent of our knowledge once discovered, and the horizon found which sets the bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things; between what is and what is not comprehensible by us, men would perhaps with less scruple acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of the one, and employ their thoughts and discourse with more advantage and satisfaction in the other."
- John Locke

“Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it”. - General Colin Powell.

“Before you do anything, think. If you do something to try and impress someone, to be loved, accepted or even to get someone's attention, stop and think. So many people are busy trying to create an image, they die in the process”. - Salma Hayek

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage

...damn everything that is grimm, dull,
motionless, unrisking, inward turning,
damn everything that won't get into the circle,
that won't enjoy,
that won't throw its heart into the tension,
surprise, fear, and delight
of the circus,
the round world,
the full existence...
        S. Helen Kelly

Damn everything but the circus!
        e.e. cummings

A circus is like a mother in whom one can confide and who rewards and punishes.
Burt Lancaster

For me a circus is a magic show that appears and disappears like a world. A circus is disturbing. It is profound
::: Marc Chagall :::

CIRCUS, n. A place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool.”
Ambrose Bierce quotes (American Writer, Journalist and Editor, 1842-1914

Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
Ben Hecht


"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

-- Mark Twain


"Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Work at it, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well as now."

-- P. T. Barnum, circus owner

The Circus

The circus! The magical city
That appears and disappears with the bat of an eye.
A cathedral for children and adults
Made of canvas and trimmed with red wagons.

A sunburst of wheel, pink lemonade and cotton candy.
A temple housing the unity of man and beast...
All performing for the good of their fellow man
With shouts of glory.

The perfomers' only reward is the echo of the applause
And laughter of children.
It cradles them to sleep.
As the red wagons roll from city to city.

The clown hides his sorrows behind a mask --
Sometimes grotesque, sometimes sad,
but always with a whimsy that is an encouragement
That makes any deformity of life seem minute.

A lesson in humanity, where man and beast risk life
and limb for the meager reward of applause.
How sad it would be if my youth would pass away
And not see the beauty of the big red wagons,
And taste the rare vintage of pink lemonade!

Or become so blasé' that I couldn't offer a silent prayer
For the man on the flying trapeze,
Or sigh as I watch him swing to and fro.

I see my own life in motion like the pendulum
On the huge clock that ticks away life.
Oh, keep me young without prejudices.
Without haste, so that I will be young.
So that my heart will be filled with glee
Next year, when the big red wagons roll in again!

To me, a great clown said that -- my Dad.

Red Skelton

"The second rate artists consolation prize is they like their own work"

"I put my heart and sould into every piece of work I ever did and half lost my mind in the process." -Van Gogh

"Anyone can improve their photo taking skills, but if there is not an inherent artistic ability born into the photographer, excellence can never be achieved." -John Fielder

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS wrote:
"A black belt only covers two inches of your ass"
~Royce Gracie

Nice.