“I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains are the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.” — Michel De Montaigne
It is an accomplishment, absolute and God-like, to know how to enjoy our being as we ought. We seek other attributes because we do not understand the use of our own; and, having no knowledge within, we sally forth outside ourselves. —‘On Experience’ by Michel de Montaigne, 1268-9.
“My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened.” — Michel de Montaigne
“…certainly philosophy is no other than sophisticated poetry. Whence do the ancient writers extract their authorities but from the poets? and the first of them were poets themselves, and writ accordingly. Plato is but a poet unripped. Timon calls him, insultingly, ‘a monstrous forger of miracles’.” Michel de Montaigne, Essays
“He is always against something. Anger incites him. I am always for something. Anger poisons me. I love, I love, I love.” — Anais Nin, “Henry and June”
“She bubbles, her talk is like the foam of the sea, her laughter dispels all concerns.” — Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955.
“I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.” — Anaïs Nin, The Diary Of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947
“I feel very small. I don’t understand. I have so much courage, fire, energy, for many things, yet I get so hurt, so wounded by small things.” — — Anaïs Nin, from Nearer the Moon: The Previously Unpublished Unexpurgated Diary, 1937-1939
“We are all, in turn, wounded, by someone, something.” — Anais Nïn, from The Diaries of Anais Nïn, Vol. 7: 1966-1974.
“Even memory is an act of imagination, you never tell the same story twice, not even to yourself.” — Michael Burkard, as featured in Mary Ruefle’s On Imagination
Nightmare (Detail), 1846 - Ditlev Blunck
Saint Andrew, Pompeo Batoni, 1740-43
Purity of the Heart
Pompeo Batoni
Oil on canvas
c. 1752
Jan Bogaerts (1878-1962) House with Garden in the Vosges
Henry Robert Morland, “The Ballad Singer”, ca. 1764
Twilight at seaside, 1819, Caspar David Friedrich
“Fiction teaches us that the sorrows of living are meaningful. Fiction restores the meaning. The experience which is being lived day by day may seem futile, destructive because the vision of totality is lacking. In the novel it acquires a pattern. It is fiction. It reaches beyond pain to the pattern of meaningfulness which consoles us for all the agonies, and uncovers elevations.” Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume Five 1947-1955
“When one is uprooted, transplanted, there is a temporary withering. I always panic at this and think it is permanent. I thought my life was shrinking… I began to sprout new leaves.” — Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. three
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” — Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974
I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise. Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry featured in The Diary Of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947
“I walk into the fire always, and come out more alive.” — Anaïs Nin, from a letter quoted in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume IV (1944-1947)
Peter Alexander (American, b. 1939), Punta Jose, 1986. Oil and wax on canvas
Running Artemis, Greek, late 2nd century BC–early 1st century AD, Saint Louis Art Museum: Ancient Art
Portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga (1598–1655), half-length, as a Bride. Giusto Sutterman. Flemish 1597-1681. oil/canvas. Christie’s Oct. 2020.
Bergh Richard - Nordic Summer Evening (1900)
Orazio Gentileschi - Danae (1621)
Andrew Wyeth - Her Room (1963)
Harald Slott-Møller - Georg Brandes at the University in Copenhagen (1889)
Naum Gabo, Opus 9, 1973