“Adversity will do something too you or for you…….”

letter to Koichi Mano (3 February 1966); published in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman (2005), p. 198, 201
also quoted by Freeman Dyson in "Wise Man" http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18350, The New York Review of Books (20 October 2005)
Context: The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. … No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it. You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself — it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.

Source: "Jobs: Iconoclast and salesman" by Brian Williams, at MSNBC http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12974884/ (25 May 2006)

Quote from the six page comic How to Look at Anvolved in some ideas. In painting – for me – no fooling-the-eye, no window-hole-in-the wall, no illusions, no representations, no associations, no distortions, no paint-caricaturing, no dream pictures of dripping, no delirium trimmings, no sadism or slashing, no therapy, no kicking-the-effigy, no clowning, no acrobatics, no heroics, no self-pity, no guilt.. ..no abstraction of everything, no nonsense, no involvements, no confusing painting with everything that is no painting.


Source: Contemporary American Painting, University rt, in Arts & Architecture, January 1947. note: 1940 - 1955,
en.wikiquote.org - Ad Reinhardt / Quotes of Ad Reinhardt / 1940 - 1955

Source: American Psycho

Source: Last Sacrifice