take care of the luxuries

Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays.
Clutch it, and it darts away.

His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets.

Most good women are hidden treasures who are only safe
because nobody looks for them.

Artwork by Diego Rivera
Quotes by Dorothy Parker

three sugars please ~

inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about

be with those that help your being

Be with those who help your being.
Don’t sit with indifferent people, whose breath
comes cold out of their mouths.

Not these visible forms, your work is deeper.

A chunk of dirt thrown in the air breaks to pieces.
If you don’t try to fly,
and so break yourself apart,
you will be broken open by death,
when it’s too late for all you could become.
—Rumi

art is never finished, only abandoned

Learning never exhausts the mind.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.

Artwork of & by Pablo Picasso.
Quotes by Leonardo da Vinci

i sit quietly like the earth

The very center of your Heart is where Life begins,
the most beautiful place on earth.
—Rumi

imagination is more important than knowledge

A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities.
The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit
to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and all science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe,
is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Quotes by Albert Einstein
Art by Edward Hopper

the space between us

The most alive moment comes when those
who love each other, meet each others eyes
and in what flows between them.
—Rumi

only great minds can afford a simple style

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

Beauty is the promise of happiness.

A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.

The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.

Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.

Photographs by Roberto Badin
Quotes by Stendhal

this is the golden age

You want to know what scares people? Success.

Success is a threat. Why should this be? Why are so many willing to forsake their destiny?

It takes courage to fail over and over and over again—and still believe in yourself. To pursue your destiny despite everything and everyone that you will have release along the way, because there are too many people who are embittered and want you to stay by their side and quit, just as they did. And talk ish cause what else is there to do when you do nothing at all. To choose distractions over focus, to choose destruction over creation, to choose emptiness over fulfillment, to never cross the invisible line, to stay in a prison of your own making.

I know this well.

Success scares people because it reminds them of what they gave up for no reason other than they were too scared to take the risk and too cheap to invest in themselves. How easy it is to quit your life before you die, to go through the motions, to settle for a lesser fate. And then they hate all those who do well, forever jealous of the person who had the courage to fail.

Jealousy is the mark of the insecure mind. For anyone you consider a competitor rather than a colleague, you are acknowledging the fact that you see yourself coming up short. And it’s strange, that desire to compete and compare and to put yourself on a hierarchy, as though you could ever understand. What it takes to succeed. And I don’t mean to survive. I mean to thrive, to grow, to flourish, to blossom into a meadow that does not begin and does not end but cycles in seasons, blooming in the spring and dying in the fall and coming around time and again until death takes all.

I keep thinking of this, because a bigger picture slowly reveals itself. Pull back the lens and see life for what it is. A window of opportunity. A chance to live your dream. Because, let’s get real, this is two thousand and twelve. It is the Golden Age. And every Golden Age is the tipping point because waves crest and peak and crash upon the shore and we are riding the bubbly white foam right about now. The time is now, and now is all we have.

Success isn’t easy, but life isn’t for the weak of heart or mind or spirit. And death comes, inevitably. And when it comes, as I have seen, a terror sets in, remorse unlike any other, karma by a lesser name. Last night I was writing in my head, writing the fourth book, and it kept me awake. This story is so dark, and everyone around me is in the deepest kind of denial and why, why would they deny the truth? Except that it means they know they were powerless.

But not I, that has never been me. Power tingles at my fingertips, strange I should use a keyboard to unleash my energies. But it is not by accident that I should write. Because writing is salvation and writing is freedom. And when they are dead, then the story will be told, but before then I do not wait, I have my destiny to uphold.

flowww ~

I borrow nothing.
I don’t want anything from anybody.
I flow through human beings.
Love is my only companion.
—Rumi

let me live, love and say it well in good sentences

And by the way, everything in life is writable about
if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.
The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
― Sylvia Plath

truth ~

People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world
is also a confession of character.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

the entire universe is inside you

Lovers feel a truth that rational people keep denying.
—Rumi

one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower