“Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.”

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act.

We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.

The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.

Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.

The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you.

Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.

Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together

If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

The zoo cannot but disappoint.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.

I just didn’t know where I fit in – I didn’t seem to fit in my parent’s generation. I didn’t seem to fit in my own generation. Little by little, this took me into a spiritual search for understanding; a search for meaning and fulfillment.

The world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.

Dreams are not without meaning wherever they may come from — from fantasy, from the elements, or from another inspiration.

Love has a broader & profound meaning beyond this box. Surely, the highest state of love is Love of God, a love between creations & the Creator.

I came to the conclusion that unless I found myself and became the change I wanted to see in the world – as Gandhi said – I couldn’t contribute much, nor would there be anything fulfilling or meaningful in my life. So I went on a spiritual search.

She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life…