a visual way to explore the brain pickings book archive :: otlet's shelf theme :: back to brain pickings
CREATIVITY :: DESIGN :: SCIENCE :: HISTORY :: PSYCHOLOGY :: ART
|
Meth in the morning, back to bed, then for breakfast, “a salted soft-boiled egg with toast, or perhaps fresh-squeezed lemonade, and two cups of very sweet tea.”
William S. Burroughs’s defiant daily routine in the last year of his life.
|
“Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.”
Frida Kahlo’s passionate handwritten love letters to Diego Rivera:
|
“No amount of effort can save you from oblivion.”
A rare glimpse inside Kurt Cobain’s handwritten letters and journals:
|
“The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. … What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. ”
Virginia Woolf on the creative benefits of keeping a diary:
|
“All the Arts … imitate as far as they can the one great truth that all can see.”
Virginia Woolf’s early journals and letters:
|
“You exist by your smile and your presence… Quests, pursuits of concrete securities of one kind or another lose all their importance.” Anaïs Nin offers an antidote to city life.
|
“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
|
“To stay sane in an insane world as a creative man or woman he or she must…” 6 rules for creative sanity from iconic psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich at the link.
|
“The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man’s cult of beauty.”