The true genius shudders at incompleteness – and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
E. A. Poe
Category: Quotations
Philosophy and Religion
A little philosophy makes men aetheists: A great deal reconciles them to religion.
Francis Bacon
An Atmosphere of Silence
Every deed and every relationship is surrounded by an atmosphere of silence. Friendship needs no words- it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Be Always a Passer-By
Be in this world as if you are a traveler, a passer-by, with your cloths and shoes full of dust. Sometimes you sit under the shade of a tree, sometimes you walk in the desert. Be always a passer-by, for this is not home.
Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)
Reward of Suffering
The reward of suffering is experience.
Aeschylus
Man Will Prevail
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
William Faulkner
Genius
The measure of genius is character. Genius is not talent plus character, but character manifesting itself in the form of a special talent. Just as one man will show courage by jumping into the water after someone, so another will show courage by writing a symphony. Genius is talent exercised with courage.
Wittgenstein
The Laughable…
Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable.
Goethe
Humanity of the Moment
There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.
Robert Frank
Ansel Adams and Robert Frank
Quality doesn’t mean deep blacks and whatever tonal range. That’s not quality, that’s a kind of quality. The pictures of Robert Frank might strike someone as being sloppy–the tone range isn’t right and things like that–but they’re far superior to the pictures of Ansel Adams with regard to quality, because the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. But the quality of Robert Frank is a quality that has something to do with what he’s doing, what his mind is. It’s not balancing out the sky to the sand and so forth. It’s got to do with intention.
Elliott Erwitt