RON HENGGELER

Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.

Henri Matisse

SAN FRANCISCO in the years before the 1906 fire provided a sort of Big Rock Candy Mountain for the entire American people. . .

Good Americans when they died might, in the terms of the epigram, go to Paris. While they where alive they wanted to go to California.
Oceans of champagne, silk hats and frock coats, blooded horses, and houses on Nob Hill, these were the rewards that came to the industrious, the far sighted, or the merely fortunate. What better scheme of things, at least on this side of the river, could any man ask?

Lucius Beebe

San Francisco beats the world for novelties; but the inventive faculties of her people are exercised as a specialty. . . Controversy is our forte.

San Francisco Call 1864

Remember yourself always and everywhere.

Gurdjieff

For all its contradictions. . . San Francisco remains a beacon, always with that dangerous streak of insanity, built in at birth.

Herb Caen

Your city is remarkable not only for its beauty. It is also, of all the cities in the United States, the one whose name, the world over, conjures up the most visions and more than any other, incites one to dream.

Georges Pompidou

I give thanks to my Creator for this wonderful life where each of us has the opportunity to learn lessons we could not fully comprehend by any other means.

Joseph B. Wirthlin

My wild-knight neon twinkle fate there, ah, and then finally at dawn of a Sunday and they did call me, the immense girders of Oakland Bay still haunting me and all that eternity too much to swallow and not knowing who I am at all.

Jack Kerouac

To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.

Ivan Turgenev

"To this day the city of San Francisco remains to the Chinese the Great City of the Golden Mountains."

Kai Fu Shah, Chinese Minister to U.S. 1914

Your attitude is like a box of crayons that color your world. Constantly color your picture gray, and your picture will always be bleak. Try adding some bright colors to the picture by including humor, and your picture begins to lighten up.

Allen Klein

First in rapture

And first in beauty

Wayward, passionate, brave

Glad of life God gave.

The sea-winds are her kiss,

And the seagull is her dove.

Cleanly and strongly she is--

My cool, grey city of love.

George Sterling

The only real elegance is in the mind; if you've got that, the rest really comes from it.

Diane Vreeland

“Thank God we’re all living in San Francisco. I’d hate to be this annoyed anywhere else.”

Herb Caen

“Queen of the Pacific Coast! Fair city whose changing skies for half the year shower down mist and rain, and the other half sunbeams of molten brass! Metropolis of alternate sticky mud and blinding dust! In spite of these and more thou art a city of my heart, O Ciudad de San Francisco!”

T.S. Kenderdine

To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.

Victor Hugo

If you’re going to San Francisco,

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

If you’re goin’ to San Francisco,

You’re gonna meet some gentle people there.

For those who come to San Francisco,

Summertime will be a love-in there.

In the streets of San Francisco,

Gentle people with flowers in their hair.

All across the nation,

Such a strong vibration: People in motion.

There’s a whole generation,

With a new explanation, People in motion, People in motion.

If you come to San Francisco,

Summertime will be a love-in there.

SAN FRANCISCO by John Phillips 1967

The Canticle of the Sun

by Francis of Assisi (San Francisco)

Most high, all powerful, all good Lord! All praise is yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing. To you, alone, Most High, do they belong. No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce your name.

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun, who brings the day; and you give light through him. And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor! Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in the heavens you have made them, precious and beautiful.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air, and clouds and storms, and all the weather, through which you give your creatures sustenance.

Be praised, My Lord, through Sister Water; she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire, through whom you brighten the night. He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.

Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth, who feeds us and rules us, and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

Be praised, my Lord, through those who forgive for love of you; through those who endure sickness and trial. Happy those who endure in peace, for by you, Most High, they will be crowned.

Be praised, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whose embrace no living person can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin! Happy those she finds doing your most holy will. The second death can do no harm to them.

Praise and bless my Lord, and give thanks, and serve him with great humility.

I never kill insects. If I see ants or spiders in the room, I pick them up and take them outside. Karma is everything.

Holly Valance

“San Franciscans have it easier. When they go bust they have the view. True, you can’t eat it, but it feeds the soul.”

Herb Caen

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.
Hellen Keller

The Sutro Tower’s construction began in 1971 and was completed in 1972. Named after Adolph Sutro, a businessman and former mayor of San Francisco, the tower stands 977 feet from the ground and 1,800 ft from sea level. It is the tallest structure in San Francisco, surpassing the 853 ft Transamerica Pyramid by more than 100 ft. In addition, it is built on one of the highest peaks in the city, Mount Sutro, the old site of the Sutro Mansion owned by Adolph Sutro's descendents. About 15 million pounds of concrete were used to make the foundation of the 3.7 million pound tower. Earthquake proofing includes ballasting two thirds of the weight of the structure below ground, with resulting center of gravity at sixteen feet below ground level. It is used to transmit ten analog, eleven digital TV stations, and four FM radio stations to the San Francisco Bay area.

Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.

Coco Chanel

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.

Rabindranath Tagore

Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.

Stewart Udall

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

Albert Camus

Good buildings make and are made by their settings, and they are appropriately different in different locations. Climate, culture, topography and materials have helped create regional architectural languages that seem curiously right for their locations and for all times.

Jaquelin T. Robertson

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Leonardo da Vanci

Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge began on January 5, 1933 and the last rivet was placed on May 27, 1937. The bridge is 6, 450 ft. long and 90 ft. wide. The towers rise 746 ft. above the water and the height of the roadway span at center is 220 ft. above low tide. The main cables from which the span hangs (each 36.5 inches diameter and 7, 660 ft. long) are made up of 27, 572 strands of 0.2 inch diameter steel cable. . .22,000 tons worth and 80,000 miles long. This 0.2 inch cable could circle the globe at the equator more than five times. 693,000 cubic yards of concrete and 100,000 tons of steel were used in spanning the Gate. 25,000,000 man hours went into building the Golden Gate Bridge. . .eleven men lost their lives during its construction. The bridge, as designed, can sway 27.7 ft. during high winds. The paint color of the Golden Gate Bridge is International Orange. There are now well over a thousand known suicides who have jumped off the bridge since it opened in 1937. Nearly all these desperate souls who finally went over the side, did so facing towards San Francisco, but that is simply because pedestrians are not allowed on the ocean side of the span.

You can't go wrong mixing classic graphics in black and white. It's very Parisienne.

Brad Goreski

“It’s the indescribable conglomeration of beauty and ugliness that makes San Francisco a poem without meter, a symphony without harmony, a painting without reason---a city without an equal.”

Herb Caen

“San Francisco was not just a wide open town. It is the only city in the United States which was not settled overland by the westward–spreading puritan tradition . . .

It had been settled mostly, in spite of the romances of the overland migration, by gamblers, prostitutes, rascals, immigrants, and fortune seekers who came across the Isthmus and around the Horn. They had their faults, but they were not influenced by Cotton Mather. “

Kenneth Rexroth, Beat poet

“There is no stupidity great enough to ruin the majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge. It has been the subject of terrible poetry and worse paintings, but it rises easily and grandly above the mundane, its towers poking through the fogs, natural and man-made.”

Herb Caen

The continued existence of wildlife and wilderness is important to the quality of life of humans.

Jim Fowler

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Aldous Huxley

“San Francisco is unique---a thing without a parallel, one that admits of no comparisons, for there is nothing like it in the histories of cities.”

William M’Collum, M.D.

God sleeps in the minerals, awakens in plants, walks in animals, and thinks in man.

Arthur Young

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.

Pablo Picasso

The air in San Francisco has an indefinable softness and sweetness—a tonic quality that braces the nerves to a joyous tension, making the very sense of existence a delight.

Scribner's Monthly

“A wall of thick, dirty fog rising genie-like from the Pacific, while a finger of whiter, puffier stuff feels its way into the bay, twisting this way and that till it conforms to every contour, snugly and coldly.”

Herb Caen

In San Francisco today a wet grey

winter storm with cold wind.

At dusk a sudden break

and a splash of rainbow

as the sun disappears for good behind the clouds

coming in from the Pacific.

With night falling

Market Street becomes a moving river of lights

slowly appearing in the black of night

like molten gold pouring from a foundry's bucket

before more rain.

 

Ron Henggeler

“I like the way the wind whips your skirts when you go by cable car up Nob Hill. I like the salt spray in your face when the surf breaks on the rocks at Fort Point. I like the white waves the ferry boats leave as they ply the bay, to the Oakland mole. I like the seals barking on the rocks at the Cliff House. I like the fog rolling over St. Francis Wood. I like the trolleys racing each other down Market Street’s four tracks. I like the Irish cops and the Italian flower vendors. I just like San Francisco, I guess.”

Rita Hayworth

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

Buddha

“The city is like a snake, shedding its skin, changing constantly, moving about in unexpected directions. However, if it is a great city, which San Francisco forever is, it retains its basic qualities---a sense of adventure, a delight in its own history, an air of freedom and a rare tolerance for divergent views and actions. The city dances on its hills and unashamedly enjoys its own beauty, which has survived many a long night of excesses, both joyous and tragic.

San Francisco, a great writer’s town---tantalizing, just out of reach in its misty aloofness. A city so small and yet so varied, from block to block. Cross a street and enter a different world. Every writer about San Francisco strives to capture its essence and, on occasion, feels he has succeeded---but the city is always one step ahead, laughing, disappearing into the fog.” Herb Caen January 25, 1992

From HERB CAEN’S SAN FRANCISCO 1997-1991 Published by Chronicle Books 1992

Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.

Le Corbusier

The red-orange color of the Golden Gate Bridge is somewhat of an accident. When the towers were constructed, they were coated in the red-orange primer, which was extended to the rest of the bridge as the work continued. Designers of the bridge liked the way the distinctive color complimented the hills of Marin County and provided a contrast to the fog that swirled through the towers, so the bridge remained International Orange. It also increases the visibility of the bridge in fog. The top coat of orange is replaced constantly because the auto exhaust and chilly, salty air eats away at the finish . A team is employed fulltime to apply about two tons of the coloring per week to keep the paintwork in good condition and prevent the bridge from rusting. It takes four years to apply one coat. The job is not for the faint-hearted. Painters have to be able to climb to the top of the bridge’s 746- foot towers and routinely brave 30-mile-per-hour winds.

Respectfully taken from SAN FRANCISCO SECRETS by John Snyder 1999 Chronicle Books

“With the memory of persons not yet old, a mariner might have steered into these narrows—not yet the Golden Gates—opened out the surface of the bay—here girt with hills, there lying broad to the horizon—and beheld a scene as empty of the presence, as pure from the handiwork, of man, as in the days of our old sea-commander. . . .Now, a generation later, a great city covers the sand-hills of the west, a growing town lies along the muddy shallows of the east; steamboats pant continually between them from before sunrise till the small hours of the morning; lines of great sea-going ships lie ranged at anchor; colours fly upon the islands; and from all around the hum of corporate life, of beaten bells, and steam, and running carriages, goes cheerily abroad in the sunshine. Choose a place on one of the huge throbbing ferryboats, and, when you are midway between the city and the suburb; look around. The air is fresh and salt as if you were at sea. On the one hand is Oakland, gleaming white among its gardens. On the other, to seaward, hill after hill is crowded and crowned with the palaces of San Francisco; its long streets lie in regular bars of darkness, east and west, across the sparkling picture; a forest of masts bristles like bulrushes about its feet; nothing remains of the days of Drake but the fanciful trade-wind scattering the smoke, the fogs that will begin to muster around sundown, and the fine bulk of Tamalpais looking down on San Francisco like Arthur’s seat on Edinburgh.”

From SAN FRANCISCO by Robert Louis Stevenson [1883]

Rivers, ponds, lakes and streams - they all have different names, but they all contain water. Just as religions do - they all contain truths.

Muhammad Ali

Oh Lord, please help me to become the person that my dog thinks I am.

(read on a bumper sticker)

“When you drive in on a Sunday evening after a hot day in the country and catch that first glimpse of the white fog racing in shreds---as though torn from a giant Kleenex box! --- yes, flinging itself, Kleenix-like, through the cables of the world’s greatest if too narrow bridge, you know why you live here.”

Herb Caen

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

Albert Schweitzer

Sense the blessings of the earth in the perfect arc of a ripe tangerine, the taste of warm, fresh bread, the circling flight of birds, the lavender color of the sky shining in a late afternoon rain puddle, the million times we pass other beings in our cars and shops and out among the trees without crashing, conflict, or harm.

Jack Kornfield

I fell in love with the most cordial sociable city in the Union. After the sagebrush and alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was paradise to me.

Mark Twain

Denim

Like many merchants during the Gold Rush, Levi Strauss journeyed to San Francisco to sell goods to the prospectors. An immigrant from Germany, he brought a load of canvas to turn into tents. Strauss had no success selling the tents, but constantly heard miners complain that their pants didn’t hold up to the rigors of the gold mines. He turned the canvas into pants instead, and the garments were an instant hit. He eventually switched from canvas to a tough blue cotton fabric loomed in Nimes, France, called serge de Nimes, which quickly became the word “denim” and gave the trousers their trademark color. The name “jeans” came from the French word Genes (meaning “Genoa”), as the trousers were reminiscent of those once worn by Genoan sailors. The copper rivets, originally designed for saddles, were added to reinforce the pants in the 1870’s and emblazoned with the initials SF for San Francisco. Levi jeans became part of the popular culture during the 1950’s, and business more than doubled in the 1960s. The company is still in San Francisco and is operated by descendants of Levi Strauss.

Respectfully taken from SAN FRANCISCO SECRETS by John Snyder 1999 Chronicle Books

Like water which can clearly mirror the sky and the trees only so long as its surface is undisturbed, the mind can only reflect the true image of the Self when it is tranquil and wholly relaxed.

Indra Devi

The miracle of life, and light, on San Francisco Bay

 

The water colored twilight,
with Pelicans and Alcatraz on San Francisco Bay,
as seen from Treasure Island.
In the chilly air,
I catch through my lens,
the sense of an infinite profoundness,
like a falling star.
Go figure.

 

Ron Henggeler

Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

Gertrude Stein

ONE DAY if I do go to heaven, I’m going to do what every San Franciscan does who goes to heaven, I’ll look around and say, “it ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.”

Herb Caen

“It’s a town that is forever grabbing you by the throat and saying, ‘Look around, see what’s going on, feel it, experience it.

You don’t have to enjoy it. Just don’t turn your back on it, OK?’”

Herb Caen

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Aldous Huxley

The Sutro Baths The largest of the Sutro Baths’ public swimming pools was 300 feet long and 175 feet wide. Their creator, Prussian-born Adolf Sutro, arrived in San Francisco in 1851 at the age of 21 to seek Gold Rush riches, but made his fortune from silver and the Comstock Lode in Nevada. Mining silver proved to be too treacherous, so Sutro designed a four-mile-long tunnel beneath the silver vein that allowed miners better access to the lucrative seams. Returning to San Francisco, he sank his money into real estate and eventually owned one-twelfth of the land in the city. When Sutro opened his opulent Sutro Baths in 1896, there was room for 25,000 swimmers and spectators amid sculptures and ancient artifacts under a soaring glass dome. The baths had an assortment of slides, trapezes, and swings, 500 private dressing rooms, and restaurants on three levels. Visitors could see the ocean through a tunnel cut in the rocks or from behind 100,000 square feet of glass. Sutro Baths prospered for only about a decade, then gradually deteriorated. A suspicious fire destroyed the baths in 1966. The ruins can still be seen north of the Cliff House at the end of Point Lobos Avenue on land owned by the National Park Service.

From SAN FRANCISCO SECRETS by John Snyder Chronicle Books 1999

For all its contradictions. . . San Francisco remains a beacon, always with that dangerous streak of insanity, built in at birth.

Herb Caen

Oh friends, put aside these sounds!

Let us be more civil to each other,

And speak more joyfully.

Beethoven

"When you're in love with a city, you grope for shadows that vanish at first touch."

Herb Caen

Isadore Boudin came to San Francisco in 1849 and four years later he opened the bakery where he produced his famous sourdough bread. Sourdough was invented by the Egyptians more than 4,000 years ago, but the white, crusty, slightly bitter, no yeast loaf has become synonymous with San Francisco. There is no doubt that sourdough bread made in the city has a different taste than sourdough bread made anywhere else. Many aficionados assert that the unique , tangy flavor of the local bread can be attributed to the spores, fungi, and bacteria in the San Francisco air. Others claim the special taste of the bread is the result of the fog. Sourdough was a staple food in the Gold Rush days. Miners took sour starters with them on their travels to the extent that those who participated in the Alaska gold rush of the 1890s were called “sourdoughs”. The Boudin Sourdough Bakery is still producing loaves of the popular bread.

Respectfully taken from SAN FRANCISCO SECRETS by John Snyder 1999 Chronicle Books

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

Bertrand Russell

"The bay of San Francisco has been celebrated from the time of its first discovery as one of the finest in the world. It rises into an importance far above that of a mere harbor. . . Its latitude position is that of Lisbon, Its climate that of Southern Italy, settlements attest to its healthfulness, bold shores and mountains give it grandeur, the extent and fertility of its dependent country give it great resources for agriculture, commerce, and population. . . To this gate I gave the name Chrysopylae or Golden Gate. . . “

John Fremont

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Charles Dickens

The Palace of Fine Arts is the only building remaining from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The Palace of Fine Arts is located at Baker and Beach Streets alongside a lagoon. San Francisco celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal and the city’s revival from the 1906 earthquake by staging the fair in which 29 states and 24 nations participated. At the center was a tower covered with more than 100,000 cut-glass jewels imported from Bohemia. The fair drew more than 18 million visitors in 10 months. The exposition featured the tallest flagpole ever erected: a 299-foot, 52 ton, trimmed Douglas fir. Like other temporary fair buildings, the Palace of Fine Arts was originally constructed of inexpensive wood and plaster. It was so popular however, that San Franciscans couldn’t bear to dismantle it. Designed to look like a Roman ruin, the building deteriorated into a genuine ruin. Restored in 1962 with reinforced concrete, it serves a 1,000seat theatre and also houses the Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum. During World War II, the Palace of Fine Arts was used as a warehouse for Army medical supplies.

From SAN FRANCISCO SECRETS by John Rnyder Chronicle Books 1999

THE REDWOODS

Here, sown by the Creator’s hand,

In serried ranks, the Redwoods stand;

No other clime is honored so,

No other lands their glory know.

The greatest of Earth’s living forms,

Tall conquerors that laugh at storms;

Their challenge still unanswered rings,

Through fifty centuries of kings.

The nations that with them were young,

Rich empires, with their forts far-flung,

Lie buried now-their splendor gone;

But these proud monarchs still live on. . .

To be like these, straight, true and fine,

To make our world, like theirs, a shrine:

Sink down, Oh traveler, on your knees.

God stands before you in these trees.

-Joseph B. Strauss, Builder of the Golden Gate Bridge

“....this marvelous city. Bazaar of all the nations of the globe, (compares) with the fantastic creations of ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ ”

Edmond Auger, French gold hunter seeing San Francisco in 1849

This is the season in which I like San Francisco best; although we’re normally a Californian city, there’s a certain dreamy quality to the place that’s often at odds with the matter-of-factness of sunny day after sunny say. After all, aren’t we supposed to be the cool grey city of love?

Laurel Wellman

Whoever laid the town out took the conventional checkerboard pattern of streets and without the slightest regard for the laws of gravity planked it down blind on . . . a confusion of steep slopes and sandhills. The result is exhilarating.

John Dos Passos

No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow.

Euripides

NO more jazz

At Alcatraz

No more piano

For Lucky Luciano

No more trombone

For Al Capone

No more jazz

At Alcatraz

No more cello

For Frank Costello

No more screeching of the

Seagulls

As they line up for

Chow

No more jazz

At Alcatraz

NO MORE JAZZ AT ALCATRAZ by Bob Kaufman (n.d.)

“A city that is essentially gray, gray as the fog, the Rock, the bay and the hair of those who love it best.”

Herb Caen

San Francisco was the birthplace of the United Nations

There was considerable sentiment to keep the U.N. in San Francisco, where it began, but it was moved to New York City because many European nations believed San Francisco was too far to travel. The opening sessions of the United Nations were held at the War Memorial Opera House at Van Ness Avenue and Grove Street in the Civic Center beginning in April 1945. High-level diplomats met at the Fairmont Hotel to discuss details of the peace-keeping organization. On June 26, 1945, during the waning days of World War II, representatives of 50 nations signed the U.N. charter next door to the Opera House at the Herbst Theatre. The United Nations Plaza at Market and Hyde Streets commemorates the event. The Fairmont Hotel flies the flags of each of the countries above its main entrance. The formal peace treaty between the United States and Japan was also signed at the War Memorial Opera House, in 1951.

Respectfully taken from SAN FRANCISCO SECRETS by John Snyder 1999 Chronicle Books

I left my heart in San Francisco

High on a hill it calls to me,

To be where little cable cars

Climb halfway to the stars,

The morning fog may chill the air--

I don’t care.

Douglas Cross and George Cory

“San Francisco owes its fabled beauty to nature more than any other source. Hills, fog, and water define the city. But nature, of course, both acts upon San Francisco and is acted upon by it. Virtually none of the landscape is as it was when the Ohlone lived off the land: even the city's forests were imported, to make the environment appear gentler and more like places that settlers had left behind.

But as we are reminded every time the earth quakes, nature is not gentle, and the changes wrought by natural forces dwarf any that humans have made on the terrain. Take San Francisco Bay. Twenty-five thousand years ago, before the end of the last Ice Age, it wasn’t a bay at all, but a valley carved out by the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. Their currents flowed through the Golden Gate and clear out to today’s Farallon Islands before joining the ocean. That ocean created and carried the sand upon which San Francisco is built---sand in drifts so deep that today’s Richmond and Sunset districts may well lie over buried rock peaks. The glaciers melted; water filled the valley and made a bay, and on that bay floated Spanish boats towards what would one day be San Francisco. “

THE GREAT SAN FRANCISCO Trivia & Fact Book by Janet Bailey

San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.

Paul Kantner of the rock band Jefferson Airplane

You are fortunate to live here. If I were your President, I would levy a tax on you for living in San Francisco.

Mikhail Gorbachev

On an average day, Golden Gate Park, aptly named, was home to 99 varieties of light. I counted them. I will mention a few--you can discover the others: the oblique light between eucalyptus leaves at sunrise. The light in the Garden of Fragrance, which is set up as a cornucopia for every sense but sight. The little chunks of colored light that fall on the ground between the light-thin profusion of orchids inside the Conservatory of Flowers. The light on the Hippie Hill, where the first Love-In was held. The light-turning-to-cloud in late afternoon as the Pacific breezes drive in the fog.

Andrei Codrescu

“San Francisco is a city where people are never more abroad than when they are at home.”

Benjamin F. Taylor

Because forgiveness is like this: a room can be dank because you have closed the windows, you've closed the curtains. But the sun is shining outside, and the air is fresh outside. In order to get that fresh air, you have to get up and open the window and draw the curtains apart.

Desmond Tutu

Whoever laid the town out took the conventional checkerboard pattern of streets and without the slightest regard for the laws of gravity planked it down blind on. . . a confusion of steep slopes and sandhills. The result is exhilarating. John Dos Passos I went to San Francisco I saw the bridges high, Spun across the water Like cobwebs in the sky.

Langston Hughes

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

Graham Green

“Some people become San Franciscans almost immediately, feeling the poetry, sensing the specialness, seeing what makes the city great and not so great, boning up on the history and walking the streets with glamorous ghosts at their elbows. Others can live here all their lives and never get the message.”

Herb Caen

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.

Mother Teresa

They park the car by the Marina.

The surface of the cobalt bay

Is flecked with white. The moister, keener

October air has rinsed away

The whispering mists with crisp intensity

And over the opaque immensity

A deliquescent wash of blue

Revels the bridge, long lost to view

In summer’s quilt of fog: the towers

High built, red-gold, with their long span

--The most majestic spun by man--

Whose threads of steel through mists and showers,

Wind, spray, and the momentous roar

Of ocean storms, link shore to shore.

From THE GOLDEN GATE by Vikram Seth (1986)

Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.

Dalai Lama

Always keep your mind as bright and clear as the vast sky, the great ocean, and the highest peak, empty of all thoughts. Always keep your body filled with light and heat. Fill yourself with the power of wisdom and enlightenment.

Morihei Ueshiba

The original City Hall structure, completed in 1898 at McAllister and Larkin Streets, collapsed in a heap during the 1906 earthquake. The focal point of the Civic Center, the current City Hall, was designed by John Bakewell and Arthur Brown. This 1915 building covers two city blocks bounded by Polk, McAllister, Van Ness, and Grove. The huge lead-lined dome is modeled after Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome and dominates the area, rising 301 feet above the street, higher than the Capitol dome in Washington D.C. The building, 400 feet long and 300 feet wide, has an exterior of granite from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. In 1960, civil rights and freedom-of-speech protesters were washed down the central stairway with fire hoses. Mayor Dianne Feinstein was married at City Hall in 1980 and invited the entire city to her wedding reception. Badly damaged by the 1989 earthquake, City Hall’s arches were supported by large wooden struts until the building was closed in 1995 for seismic retrofitting. (San Francisco’s previous City Hall was built of inferior materials, including trash and newspaper, by a corrupt city administration.)

Respectfully taken from SAN FRANCISCO SECRETS by John Snyder Chronicle Books 19

Creativity itself doesn't care at all about results - the only thing it craves is the process. Learn to love the process and let whatever happens next happen, without fussing too much about it. Work like a monk, or a mule, or some other representative metaphor for diligence. Love the work. Destiny will do what it wants with you, regardless.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you riding through the ruts, don't complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy. Don't bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality. Wake Up and Live!

Bob Marley

Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.

Anne Frank

“It has been said that all great cities of history have been built on bodies of water-Rome on the Tiber, Paris on the Seine, London on the Thames, New York on the Hudson. If this is the criterion of a city’s greatness, surely San Francisco ranks in the first magnitude among cities of the world. For never was a metropolis more dominated by any natural feature than San Francisco by its bay.”

Harold Gillian

San Francisco. "That City of Gold to which adventurers congregated out of all the winds of heaven. I wonder what enchantment of the 'Arabian Nights' can have equaled this evocation of a roaring city, in a few years of a man's life, from the marshes and the blowing sand.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

Helen Keller

All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.

Helen Keller

“To a traveler paying his first visit, San Francisco has the interest of a new planet. It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world.”

Friz Hugh Ludlow

You wouldn't think such a place as San Francisco could exist. The wonderful sunlight there, the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at you shoes. . . The lobsters, clams, and crabs. Oh, Cat, what food for you. Every kind of seafood there is.

Dylan Thomas, in a letter to his wife, Caitlin

Beauty doesn't need ornaments. Softness can't bear the weight of ornaments.

Munshi Premchand

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.

Jim Rohn

Coming home from other cities and other parts, one crosses the bay to reach San Francisco and sees first the gray silhouette of her hills, shingled with roofs and roofs and roofs; the royal fringe of masts and spars along her waterfronts; the gray fog circling and fuming softly over it all, and the gulls flying and crying. The little boats plying to and fro, sound their hoarse, sweet notes of warning, and perhaps the noon whistles and the Angelus bells take up the sound in a long chord that to some hearts say, “Welcome home!”

Each to his own city. But do you love them as we do, I wonder, you whose cities are not steep and narrowed streeted, scented with the spices of the Orient and the good tarry smell of ships and fishing, lulled by the deep rushing of ocean surges on a long beach, the lapping of the bay waters against piers?

MY SAN FRANCISCO By Kathleen Norris 1932

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

Marcus Aurelius

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin

“Only in Greece and in the Sinai have I seen light quite as three-dimensional, dense, limpid, delicate, dreamlike, and clear: To say that much of San Francisco faces north over water only partially explains the effect. I have lived in Haifa, another city that faces north over water. From its hills one can see extraordinary light, but it is not like the light of San Francisco. It isn’t as rich. The light of Rome is richer, but it isn’t as clear. In Paris, the light does magical things but only in the sky and among the clouds, seldom descending. San Francisco light isn’t merely bright and glowing like none other; it engages you in its battle with the fog, makes you an ally, sweeps you along, carries you with it (when you look out over the distance) as if you were not where you are standing but where you are looking. The pellucid, enthralling light of San Francisco is like one of those huge emerald waves in Hawaii through which surprised surfers break only to find themselves on the covers of magazines.

Light is the soul of San Francisco. It is responsible for the serenity and inner freedom that are otherwise inexplicable. It energizes. It enthralls. It redeems bad buildings and jerry-built neighborhoods and makes more beautiful the beautiful buildings and their surroundings. Most importantly, it, like the laws of proportion, is an agent that perpetually shapes the city---through human intentions, but beyond them. Unlike proportion however, which underlies even the light itself, the light is something specific, active, and surprising. Once, I was walking in Fort Mason, under the shade of the trees. I came to a place on the path where the view gave out on the Golden Gate. The metal roofs of Fort Mason itself were hardly a shade different from the color of the bridge; beyond the bridge the cliffs were tinged in red; and beyond them something was in the air, an almost imperceptible glint of gold and red light. My line of sight, amplified by the resonance of the otherworldly red and gold, was like the trajectory of a rocket, which is perhaps why I suddenly felt as if I had been shot out of a cannon. The sensation was that of flight, of tremendous velocity, of moving out of the dark, out of oneself, and into gravity-less light. San Francisco is one of the few cities in the world where things like this happen not only to beatitudes and mystics but to newsboys, politicians, and donut-fryers. If it hasn’t happened to you, perhaps you should move to Philadelphia. “

Mark Helprin from THE TRUE BUILDERS OF CITIES 1990

Yearn to burst the folded gloom

to bare the eternal heavens again

to feel once more in placid awe

the strong imagination roll

a sphere of stars above my soul.

"San Francisco is the genius of American cities. It is the wild-eyed, all-fired, hard-boiled, tender-hearted, white-haired boy of the American family of cities. It is the prodigal son. The city which does everything and is always forgiven, because of its great heart, its gentle smile, its roaring laughter, its mysterious and magnificent personality. There are no end of ways of enduring time in San Francisco, pleasantly, beautifully, and with the romance of living in everything. Eat any kind of dish the races of the world know how to prepare. Drink any kind of wine you like. Go to the opera. The symphony or a stage play. Loaf around in the high-toned bars, or in the honky-tonks. Sail the bay. If you are alive you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life. San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure. It is a city in which the spirit can know refreshment every day. “ (circa 1891)

When I admire the wonders of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in the worship of the creator.

Mahatma Gandhi