“A painting is not a battle against other people, but against oneself.”
Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter
1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)
“A painting is not a battle against other people, but against oneself.”
Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter
1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)
Haidakhan Babaji teacher in northern India
Courage and alertness
Source: The Teachings of Babaji, 29 October 1983.
“Most people consider life a battle, but it is not a battle, it is a game.”
Florence Scovel Shinn (1871–1940) American writer
Source: The Game of Life and How to Play It
Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist
Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Power of Words (1937), p. 222
Context: There is no area in our minds reserved for superstition, such as the Greeks had in their mythology; and superstition, under cover of an abstract vocabulary, has revenged itself by invading the entire realm of thought. Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought. In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends. To keep to the social level, our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities. This is illustrated by all the words of our political and social vocabulary: nation, security, capitalism, communism, fascism, order, authority, property, democracy. We never use them in phrases such as: There is democracy to the extent that... or: There is capitalism in so far as... The use of expressions like "to the extent that" is beyond our intellectual capacity. Each of these words seems to represent for us an absolute reality, unaffected by conditions, or an absolute objective, independent of methods of action, or an absolute evil; and at the same time we make all these words mean, successively or simultaneously, anything whatsoever. Our lives are lived, in actual fact, among changing, varying realities, subject to the casual play of external necessities, and modifying themselves according to specific conditions within specific limits; and yet we act and strive and sacrifice ourselves and others by reference to fixed and isolated abstractions which cannot possibly be related either to one another or to any concrete facts. In this so-called age of technicians, the only battles we know how to fight are battles against windmills.
Ion Antonescu (1882–1946) prime minister and conducător of Romania during World War II
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJodTuDeoYg
“All life battles teach us something, even those we lose”
Paulo Coelho book The Fifth Mountain
Source: The Fifth Mountain