Favourite Quotations

The basis of man's life is twofold, and it is one - the wish of every man to be confirmed as what he is, even as what he can become, by men; and the innate capacity in man to confirm his fellow-men in this way ... Genuine conversation means acceptance of otherness. (Everything) depends, so far as human life is concerned, on whether each thinks of the other as the one he is (and) unreservedly accepts and confirms him in his being this man and in his being made in this particular way.

Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other. Secretly and bashfully he watches for a Yes which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another.

Martin Buber

(Author of ‘I and Thou’)

Buber, M. (1951) Distance and relation, Hibbert Journal: Quarterly Review of Religion, Theology and Philosophy Vol. XLIX (2), pp. 105-114.

The diagnosis lies in the history if we choose to listen. Unfortunately, we are deaf.

Sir William Osler (the ‘O’ is pronounced as in ‘go’)

'The decisive moment'. Cartier-Bresson tersely defines it as "the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression."

That's it Henri - timing & composition - the luck and the art that are keys to good photojournalism.

My son has taken up meditation. At least it’s better than sitting doing nothing.

Max Kauffman

A man is more like the age in which he lives than he is like his own father and mother.

Chinese aphorism

Seneca’s question:

“What is the finest part you have played?”

To be heard is profoundly healing.

Moshe Lang

Celebrate the Temporary.

Title of a 1972 book by Clyde H. Reid

My interpretation of/projection into that: Our judgment of the goodness or badness of any event is not forever. Remain aware of impermanence & that line representing movement in Taoism’s Ying Yang symbol. Celebrate the goodness while it exists, don’t take it for granted. But also, celebrate and take comfort in the fact that any badness will inevitably change into something else. If you have lived long enough, and suffered enough and survived, your experience will confirm that. (We humans are empiricists and believe it when we see it - more readily than what our deductive reason, or someone else, tells us.)

You may lose someone or something but your judgment of that loss will be different, days, weeks, months, and years from now.

When Tantric Buddhist monks, repeating the practice introduced by the Buddha, blow away those exquisitely beautiful, painstakingly constructed mandalas of coloured sands, the ritual reminds us of the impermanences of life.

As a football player at Princeton, I always felt like Dolly Parton’s bra-straps. I knew I had an important job to do but I felt totally incapable of doing it.

Jimmy Stewart

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but they will never

forget how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou

Poet & Historian

To err is human.

To arr is to talk like pirate.

Of uncertain origin

12“

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again, since it is life.

William Faulkner, American writer