It is remarkable to think that people thought of striped fabrics before they thought of doors and windows.

Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Maybe, said his brain and his upbringing, if you make enough tea and small talk, time reverses and all bad things are undone.

Louise Penny, Still Life

And if someone were to approach you and ask ‘what do you make?’ and you were to reply ‘oh, I make things and I make them as well as I can’, chances are the questioner would be at a loss for words. Because the question ‘what do you make?’ is really about how much you earn or how big your bonus is, not ‘what do you make?’ at all.

Sir Christopher Frayling, On Craftsmanship (2011:13)

In the realm of aesthetics, are there general rules and laws of colour for the artist, or is the aesthetic appreciation of colours governed solely by subjective opinion? Students often ask this question, and my answer is always the same: “If you, unknowing, are able to create masterpieces in colour, then un-knowledge is your way. But if you are unable to create masterpieces in colour out of your unknowledge, then you ought to look for knowledge.”

Doctrines and theories are best for weaker moments. In moments of strength, problems are solved intuitively, as if of themselves.

Johannes Itten, The Elements of Colour

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.

Francis Bacon, Novum organum

In all the major traditions, the iron rule of religious experience is that it be integrated successfully with daily life.  A disorderly spirituality that makes the practitioner dreamy, eccentric or uncontrolled is a very bad sign indeed.

Karen Armstrong, “The Case for God” (2009: 113)

Your unique and individual mission will most likely turn out to be a mission of Love, acted out in one or all of three arenas: either in the Kingdom of the Mind, whose goal is to bring more Truth into the world; or in the Kingdom of the Heart, whose goal is to bring more Beauty into the world; or in the Kingdom of the Will, whose goal is to bring more Perfection into the world, through Service.

Richard Nelson Bolles, What Color is Your Parachute? (2007 edition: 339)

You’re Watership Down!
by Richard Adams

Though many think of you as a bit young, even childish, you’re actually incredibly deep and complex. You show people the need to rethink their assumptions, and confront them on everything from how they think to where they build their houses. You might be one of the greatest people of all time. You’d be recognized as such if you weren’t always talking about talking rabbits.

The Book Quiz

Health warning: thinks if you’re not focused on America then you’re a bit weird.  Possibly just not American…

Hypomania (mild mania) and cyclothymia (mild manic-depression) are the best states for creativity because they increase both the quantity of created work and its quality.  These milder states can allow the individual to be more disciplined and less impulsive than do the severer stages, thus improving the chances of carrying the work to completion.  They induce less of the impatience and distractibility that interfere with work.  The person who fluctuates between mild depression and mild mania profits from the best of both states.  He or she is imaginative, original, insightful, conscientious, and willing to keep working until no further improvement can be made.

Ioan James, “Psychologists look at Mathematicians” in Mathematics Today 45(1)

Simple motion strikes us as banal.  The time element must be eliminated.  Yesterday and tomorrow as simultaneous.  In music, polyphony helped to some extent to satisfy this need.  A quintet in Don Giovanni is closer to us than the epic motion in Tristan.  Mozart and Bach are more modern than the nineteenth century.  If, in music, the time element could be overcome by a retrograde motion that would permeate consciousness, then a renaissance might still be thinkable.

[...]

Polyphonic painting is superior to music in that, here, the time element becomes a spatial element.  The notion of simultaneity stands out even more richly.

Paul Klee, diary entry for July 1917