Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.

Alice Walker

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

By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us. 

Alan Watts

Every normal human being (and not merely the 'artist') has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely a matter of courage or liberating procedures ... of voyages into the unconscious, to bring pure and unadulterated found objects to light. 

Max Ernst

You are the universe experiencing itself. 

Alan Watts

This is a wonderful day, I have never seen this one before.

Maya Andelou

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 

We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace. 

Albert Schweitzer

 

Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand - and melting like a snowflake.

Francis Bacon

It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

Ansel Adams

 

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

The darkest night that ever fell upon the earth never hid the light, never put out the stars. It only made the stars more keenly, kindly glancing, as if in protest against the darkness. 

George Eliot

Color is the fruit of life. 

Guillaume Apollinaire

The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, 'Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.' And so it starts. 

Joseph Campbell

Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art. 

Man Ray

Our real journey in life is interior.

Thomas Merton

 

It is never too late to become the person you always thought you could be.

George Eliot

The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word. 

Marcel Duchamp

We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

D.H.Lawrence

My works were designed to amuse, annoy, bewilder, mystify and inspire reflection.

Man Ray

Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence. 

Alan Watts

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

 

We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is... joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes. 

Joseph Campbell

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves. 

Alan Watts

And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.  

Dr. Seuss

 

Eventually all things fall into place. Until then, laugh at the confusion, live for the moments, and know EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON. 

Albert Schweitzer

To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence. 

Schopenhauer

It's the viewer that makes the work. 

Marcel Duchamp

 

 

It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.

Schopenhauer

Your self is sacred; be true to it. 

Paul Brunton

 

I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful - an endless prospect of magic and wonder.

Ansel Adams

 

The most important relationship we can all have is the one you have with yourself, the most important journey you can take is one of self-discovery. To know yourself, you must spend time with yourself, you must not be afraid to be alone. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

Aristotle

You've got to say yes to this miracle of life as it is, not on condition that it follow your rules. 

Joseph Campbell

 

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.

 

Your soul isn't in your body; your body is in your soul!

Alan Watts

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every morning is like a new reincarnation into this world. Let us take it then for what it is and live each moment anew. 

Paul Brunton

 

The person who has stopped being thankful has fallen asleep in life.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The source of all light is in the eye. 

Alan Watts

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. 

Joseph Campbell

You are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, breadth, and depth. 

Joseph Campbell

Everything is ecstasy inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind [it] is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. 

Jack Kerouac

The shadows are as important as the light.

Charlotte Bronte

 

To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams. 

Giorgio de Chirico

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

   All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head. 

Alan Watts

Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now. 

Jack Kerouac

The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.

Alan Watts

 

Do not try to fix whatever comes in your life. Fix yourself in such a way that whatever comes, you will be fine.

Jaggi Vasudev

 

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved. 

Ansel Adams

There is nothing but God's grace. We walk upon it; we breathe it; we live and die by it; it makes the nails and axles of the universe. 

Robert Louis Stevenson

 

The living moment is everything. 

D. H. Lawrence

There are moments when troubles enter our lives and we can do nothing to avoid them. But they are there for a reason. Only when we have overcome them will we understand why they were there. 

Paulo Coelho

You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it. 

Alan Watts

Dada is not modern at all, it is rather a return to a quasi-Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada puts an artificial sweetness onto things, a snow of butterflies coming out of a conjurer's skull. Dada is stillness and does not understand the passions. 

Trista Tzara

 

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.  

Albert Schweitzer

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

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

 

 

 

The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination.

D.H. Lawrence

 

Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be. 

Alan Watts

 

 

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment. 

Ansel Adams

 

 

 

 

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

Alfred Stieglitz

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

 

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou

 

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

Plutarch

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

 

 

If people insist on living as if there's no tomorrow, there really won't be one. 

Kurt Vonnegut

 

 

Photograph not only what you see but also what you feel. 

Ansel Adams

 

The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft. 

Gustave Flaubert

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

 

 

 

 

When something bad happens, you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.  

Dr. Seuss

Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes and easy smile is your museum.

Ansel Adams

A very Merry Christmas 
And a happy New Year 
Let's hope it's a good one 
Without any fear.  

John Lennon