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

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for freedom of thought which they seldom use

— Soren Kierkegaard

A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules, a language is a flash of the human spirit. It’s a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities

— Wade Davis

I am beginning to recognise that real happiness isn’t something large and looming on the horizon ahead but something small, numerous and already here. The smile of someone you love, a descent breakfast, the warm sunset. Your little everyday joys, all lined up in a row.

— Beau Taplin

Western communication has what linguists call a “transmitter orientation” — that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. …within a Western cultural context, which holds that if there is confusion, it is the fault of the speaker. …But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said.

— Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.

— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale