glass of water

Hannah Hoch – Der Kleine P (Little P)

“There’s only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that’s a writer sitting down to write.”

 —Mignon McLaughlin
author of 3 volumes of neurotic aphorisms

original context unclear 

reality intolerance

photographer unknown

“No artist tolerates reality.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche
(paraphrased)

a wise reader

“A wise reader reads . . . not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine.”

—Vladimir Nabokov
from “Good Readers and Good Writers”

Lucien Freud - The Artist's Mother Reading, 1975

critical judement as art

“A critical judgement of an artistic production has no civil rights in the realm of art if it isn't itself a work of art, either in its substance, as a representation of a necessary impression in the state of becoming, or in the beauty of its form and open tone...”

—Friedrich Schlegel
from "Critical Fragments" (no.117)

Eliseo Mattiacci - To think the thought (1973)

truth takes too long

“You can't tell everyone the truth all the time, and you certainly can't tell anyone the whole truth, ever, because it would take too long.”

—Lydia Davis
from "Our Trip"

Daido Moriyama - Memory (2012 publication date)

art makes us see

“Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.”

—widely attributed to Paul Klee
original context unclear

Rudy Burckhardt, A View From Brooklyn II, 1954 (detail)

unfinished and unstrong

“Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished and unstrong.”

—Friedrich Nietsche
from The Gay Science

One of a series of photographs of the astronaut John Glenn taken by an automatic sequence motion picture camera during his flight on "Friendship 7." Glenn was in a state of weightlessness traveling at 17,500 mph as these pictures were taken.

the day you catch an idea

“The day you catch an idea you fall in love with, even a small one, is a beautiful day.”

—widely attributed to David Lynch
original context unclear

From LIFE magazine - photographer unknown

revulsian of literature

“Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent—better yet, the infinite—against the temporary, against the finite.”

—Joseph Brodsky
from "Footnote to a Poem" in the collection Less than One

Ai Weiwei, second panel of the triptych "Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn" (1995/2009)

reality ≠ ego

“Reality is simply the loss of ego.”

—Ramana Maharshi
from I Am (K)Not the Body
(notes taken by Pradeep Apte on Ramana Maharshi's sayings, as recorded by Muruganar and translated by David Godman)

Monsieur by Benoit Courti