What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator

Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness. 

Anne Frank

When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.

Buddha

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination. 

Albert Einstein

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  

You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,

Love like you'll never be hurt,

Sing like there's nobody listening,

And live like it's heaven on earth.

William Purkey

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it's worth watching. 

Gerald Way

Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree. In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall.

Larry Wilde 

The Merry Book of Christmas

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, every cubic inch of space is a miracle. 

Walt Whitman

Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed. 

Garry Winogrand

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

Marcus Aurelius

It’s amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them.

Louisa May Alcott

There are two days in the year that we can not do anything, yesterday and tomorrow. 

Mahatma Gandhi

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

Do few things but do them well, simple joys are holy. 

Francis of Assisi

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas;
Soon the bells will start,
And the thing that will make them ring
Is the carol that you sing
Right within your heart. 

Meredith Willson 

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

 

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

Socrates

 

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

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new. 

Rajneesh

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

Buddha

When we pay attention to nature's music, we find that everything on the Earth contributes to its harmony.

Harat Inayat Khan

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

Attitude is a choice. Happiness is a choice. Optimism is a choice. Kindness is a choice. Giving is a choice. Respect is a choice. Whatever choice you make makes you. Choose wisely.

Roy T. Bennett

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

There is only you and your camera.

The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are. 

Ernst Haas

Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition. 

Max Ernst

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.

First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.

Rumi 

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
How are you?

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
What is God?

If you think that the Truth can be known
From words,

If you think that the Sun and the Ocean
Can pass through that tiny opening Called the mouth,

O someone should start laughing!
Someone should start wildly Laughing Now!

Hafez

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be.

Being alive is the meaning.

Joseph Campbell

Photography's like this baby that needs to be fed all the time. It's always hungry. 

Annie Leibovitz

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

Sing hey! Sing hey!
For Christmas Day;
Twine mistletoe and holly.
For a friendship glows
In winter snows,
And so let's all be jolly!

Author Unknown

You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough. 

Mae West

Things happen in front of you. That's perhaps the most wonderful and mysterious aspect of photography. 

Annie Leibovitz

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.

Joseph Campbell

Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven. 

William Shakespeare

Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.

Ernest Holmes

When I'm ready to make a photograph . . . 

I quite obviously see in my mind's eye something that is not literally there . . . 

I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without. 

Ansel Adams

The Eyes are the window to your soul. 

William Shakespeare

The greatest danger to our future is apathy.

Jane Goodall

The person who does not believe in miracles surely makes it certain that he or she will never take part in one. 

William Blake

We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep. 

William Shakespeare

Christmas! ‘Tis the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.

Washington Irving

Humanity is the earth’s nerve-endings through which planetary vibrations are received for transmission.

Gurdjieff

 

 

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

Chief Seattle 

Duwamish

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning.

It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Christmas Eve was a night of song that wrapped itself about you like a shawl. But it warmed more than your body. It warmed your heart…filled it, too, with melody that would last forever.

Bess Streeter Aldrich

 Song of Years

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. 

Oscar Wilde

You must be the change you wish to see in the world. 

Mahatma Gandhi

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. 

William Blake

 

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs. 

Ansel Adams

If you want to know the past, look at your present. If you want to know the future, look at your present. 

Gautama Buddha

Music is . . . A higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy

Ludwig van Beethoven 

Can one invent verbs? I want to tell you one: I sky you, so my wings extend so large to love you without measure.

Frida Kahlo

The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first; Be not discouraged - keep on - there are divine things, well envelop'd; I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell. 

Walt Whitman

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be.

Being alive is the meaning.

Joseph Campbell

It's the viewer that makes the work. 

Marcel Duchamp

I live and love in God's peculiar light.

Michelangelo

We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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. 

John Snyder

Whatever we believe about how we got to be the extraordinary creatures we are today is far less important than bringing our intellect to bear on how do we get together now around the world and get out of the mess that we've made. That's the key thing now. Never mind how we got to be who we are.

Jane Goodall

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path. 

Agatha Christie

It is a grave misconception to regard the mystical progress as passing mostly through ecstasies and raptures. On the contrary, it passes just as much through broken hearts and bruised emotions, through painful sacrifices and melancholy renunciations.

Paul Brunton

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. 

Oscar Wilde

The entire universe is a great theatre of mirrors. 

Alice Bailey

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

Man Ray

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

Martin Luther King Jr.

But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again. 

Gustav Mahler

The sky is not the limit. Your mind is. 

Marilyn Monroe

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

Emily Dickinson

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding. 

Erma Bombeck

Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.

Ancient Native American Proverb

This whole universe, with all its vastness, grandeur and beauty, is nothing but sheer imagination. In spite of so many discoveries, researches and scientific knowledge, the creation remains a great unsolved riddle.

Meher Baba

A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.

James Keller

All the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any. 

Walt Whitman

 

A child's life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark. 

Robert A. Heinlein

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. 

William Shakespeare

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

Euripides

Matter is spirit at its lowest level. Spirit is matter at its highest level. 

H. P. Blavatsky

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

 

Color is the fruit of life. 

Guillaume Apollinaire

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memories. 

Oscar Wilde

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

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.

Gertrude Stein

 

Look how the smaller birds greet the sun, with so much merry chirruping and so much outpouring of song! It is their way of expressing worship for the only Light they can know, an outer one. But man can also know the inner Sun, the Light of the Overself. How much more reason has he to chirp and sing than the little birds! Yet how few man feel gratitude for such privilege. 

Paul Brunton

What we think, we become.

Buddha

There is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.

J.R.R. Tolkien

 

Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art.

Maya Angelou

'Twas Christmas broach'd the mightiest ale;
'Twas Christmas told the merriest tale;
A Christmas gambol oft could cheer
The poor man's heart through half the year.

Walter Scott

 

 

 

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.

Aaron Rose

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.

Hermann Hesse

Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.

Dr. Seuss

To the one who knows how to look and feel, every moment of this free wandering life is an enchantment.

Alexandra David Neel

A babe in the house is a well-spring of pleasure, a messenger of peace and love, a resting place for innocence on earth, a link between angels and men. 

Martin Farquhar Tupper

Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life.

It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.

Joseph Campbell

Sometimes I go about pitying myself, and all the while I am being carried across the sky by beautiful clouds.

Ojibway proverb

One moment can change a day, one day can change a life, and one life can change the world. 

Gautama Buddha

I went to San Francisco 

I saw the bridges high,  

Spun across the water 

Like cobwebs in the sky. 

 

Langston Hughes

When one realizes one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.

P.D. Ouspensky

In your own bosom you bear your heaven and earth, 
And all you behold, though it appears without, 
It is within, in your imagination, 
Of which this world of mortality is but a shadow. 

William Blake

Every hour of every day is an unspeakably perfect miracle.

Walt Whitman

What is past is prologue. 

William Shakespeare