• I had no specific place to go, so I just kept walking, and looking. It was while walking the streets of that same city that the philosopher Walter Benjamin arrived at the conclusion: ‘Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.’ Perhaps it isn’t that urban spaces, when empty, create a feeling of palpable absence, but rather, when they are empty, we can confront the feelings of abandonment and loneliness that thrum below the surfaces.

    Struth’s unpeopled photos evoke the loneliness of urban life

  • “Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know. ”

    —Pema Chödrön

  • I had to admit, I’d had no trouble giving up all of my professional and intellectual responsibilities, it was actually a relief, and I had no desire whatsoever to be that businessman sitting on the other side of our Pro Première compartment, whose face grew more and more ashen the longer he talked on the phone, and who was obviously in some kind of deep shit.

    Submission: A Novel by Michel Houellebecq

  • “Look for what you notice but no one else sees.”

    —Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

  • As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and bide its head from me who might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over me the human insect.

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

  • I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

  • Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

  • Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation.

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

  • Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

  • The town’s poor seem to me often to live the most independent lives of any.

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau