“No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.”

“It is not the subject which matters but the translation of the subject into the abstraction of the surface by means of painting. Therefore I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

“But no matter how much planning you do, one tiny miscalculation, one moment of distraction, can end it all in an instant.”

Jeannette Walls book Half Broke Horses

“The important thing is: how much less you think of the body, of yourself as matter—as dead, dull, insentient matter; how much more you think of yourself as shining immortal being.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

“Some things you didn't give away, no matter how much you owed.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

“No matter how much the cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal.”

Thomas Ligotti book Teatro Grottesco

“In the end
these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you live?
How deeply did you let go?”

Jack Kornfield (1945) American writer

“All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath