Mysticism is awe. And I think any human being who’s lost awe is really a lost person. A civilization that’s lost awe, an educational system that can’t teach awe and nurture it, a worship system that is devoid of awe because it is so full of human verbosity, is perverse. These systems are doing the opposite of what we have to do, which is to awaken the heart. Mysticism is about heart-knowledge, heart-experience. It’s a wonderful balance, a marriage between the left brain and the right. A brain researcher told me his twenty-one years of work on the right brain showed that our right brain is all about awe. So let’s put our awe together with knowledge, and we’re going to get some wisdom. Currently we’re running entirely on knowledge, and that’s why we’re running out of energy, money, time, land, beauty.

— Matthew Fox, from Listening to the Land: Conversations about Nature, Culture, and Eros by Derrick Jensen (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004)

Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“A world-changing and world-opening narrative cannot be created by the whim of a single person. Rather, it owes its existence to a complex process in which various forces and actors are involved.”

— Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration

“It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story.”

— a Native American proverb

“We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or be seen. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then become a story-teller.”

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

“We can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without “re-story-ation”.

— Gary Nabhan

“The stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

“Polemics are never persuasive. Academics never inspire. Politicians only follow, never lead. Story tellers change the world.”

— Wade Davis

“The complexity and ambiguity of the environments that individuals face are best understood when language, including the richness of metaphor and the flexibility of the story, is invoked as a sensemaking device.”

— Larry Browning & Thierry Boudès, The use of narrative to understand and respond to complexity

“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”

— Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall

“Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.”

— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

“The art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.”

— Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller.

“When a ritual is embedded in a story that people believe, they act accordingly, playing out the roles the story assigns to them, and responding to the reality the story establishes…. Rituals and talismans affirm and perpetuate the consensus stories we all participate in, stories that form our reality, coordinate our labor, and organize our lives. Only in exceptional times do they stop working: the times of a breakdown in the story of the people… The only reform (therefore) that can possibly be effective will be one that embodies, affirms, and perpetuates a new story of the people.”

— Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics

Because the idea of the enviable life has now replaced the idea of the good life, it may be difficult to hear, or listen to, the parts of our patients or students that are not interested in success. There are, as we know, people around for whom being successful has not been a success… . Our ambitions—our ideals and success stories that lure us into the future—can too easily become ways of not living in the present, or of not being present at the event, a blackmail of distraction; ways, that is, of disowning, or demeaning, the actual disorder of experience. Believing in the future can be a great deadener. Perhaps we have been too successful at success and failure, and should now start doing something else.

— Adam Phillips, On Flirtation

What if, instead, we were to start with an ontology in which fluidity and solidity are not mutually incompatible properties? […] Continuous variation is more comparable to rhythm. Following Lefebvre (2004), rhythms result from the concurrence of difference and repetition, in which time and space are mutually implicated. In a world marked by rhythm there would be neither pure solidity nor pure fluidity. Conversely, a world that was purely solid or purely fluid would be without rhythm. This is consistent with the ways indigenous communities around the circumpolar north have been reporting their experience of climate change as things going out of phase. They may report, for example, that sea-ice recedes or that migratory species arrive earlier than expected, judged in relation to other environmental comings and goings with which they usually coincide. These are not punctuated contrasts but disturbances in the rhythmic fluctuations of a solid-fluid world in perpetual becoming: where nothing is solid or fluid but everything solid-becoming-fluid or fluid-becoming-solid (Serres 2000). […] The Inuit notion of sila perfectly reflects this ontology. Referring interchangeably to both weather and climate, sila is translated as the breath of life and the reason things move and change. It also means intelligence, consciousness or mind, and is understood to be a fundamental principle underlying the integrity of the cosmos. In the words of Nuttall, “it is an all-pervading life-giving force connecting a person with the rhythms of the universe, integrating the self with the natural world”. Conversely, lack of sila can mean that either people or the environment are going crazy. The emphasis on breath here is critical. In breathing we both surrender ourselves to the environment and launch ourselves into it. With every inhalation, the atmosphere enters into and becomes part of us; every exhalation in turn releases part of us into the atmosphere (Ingold 2015, 84–88). No other process matches this continual rhythmic exchange with the environment – one that continues throughout life. Through breathing we are immersed in our surroundings, and our surroundings in us. In a living world of solid-fluids, marked by constant rhythmic transformation, no organism could endure that was not open, through respiration, to its surroundings.

— Cristián Simonetti & Tim Ingold, Ice and Concrete

A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?
— Ernst Haas

An artist can have an intention, but the viewer has their own subjective experience.
– Robert Longo

Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.
— Peter Adam

The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, that has become an objective reality.

— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

As part of the business of everything being made a commodity, the shop window has taken the place of the altar-piece and the painting. Tens of thousands look into these windows and wonder. Here are the modern still-lives and the modern heroes and heroines. The function of the shop-window tableau is really the same as that of sculpture for the Greeks, or frescoes for the Italians of the Renaissance. These works appealed because they embodied the hopes, the ideals, the potentiality of most of the people who looked at them. Today there is only one common ideal, created and fostered by commerce: it is the principle that Only what you haven’t yet got is worth having.

— John Berger, A Painter of Our Time: A Novel

(the book was published in 1956. Right before Andy Warhol began experimenting with putting paintings he made for shop windows into galleries.)

Not all cultures in the world share the dominant Western view of a secularized, utilitarian, depersonalized nature. The existence of alternative views of the natural environment is important as part of the cultural heritage of humankind. This cultural diversity is akin to biodiversity as the raw material for evolutionarily adaptive responses

— Fikret Berkes (Sacred Ecology)

You must be the person you have never had the courage to be. Gradually, you will discover that you are that person, but until you can see this clearly, you must pretend and invent.

— Paulo Coelho