‘Eternal life belongs to those who lives in the present.’ -

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921

‘If each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated, (…)

Pablo Neruda, If You Forget Me

Cy Twombly, Proteus, 1984

‘Every line is the actual experience with its own unique story.’

Cy Twombly, Untitled

‘I will bring you happy flowers from the
mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of
kisses.
I want
to do with you what spring does with
the cherry trees.’

Pablo Neruda, Love Poem XIV

Cy Twombly, Coronation of Sesostris (Part V), 2000

‘If you get all tangled up, just tango on.’ - Scent of a Woman

1992 by Martin Brest, with Al Pacino and Gabrielle Anwar

‘I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.
You broke my heart’

Michael Corleone (Al Pacino)

The Godfather II, (Francis Coppola, 1974)

‘When they come … they come at what you love.’

Al Pacino & Simonetta Stefanelli in The Godfather Part III 1990

‘If I paint like a barbarian, it’s because we live in a barbarous age.’ - Karel Appel

Appel, Deux Figures, 1965 - Joost Evers © | Child IV, 1951

‘I don’t paint, I hit.’ - Karel Appel

‘But it is never too late to be wise.’

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Ch. 12, 1719

Paul Almásy

‘I am inclined to think that nothing could matter more than what people love.’

Daniel Dennett

Breaking the Spell, 2006

Helen Levitt

‘Returning to that house
And the rounded rocks of childhood — they have lasted well.
A world of things. (…)
The house
My father’s once, and the ground. There is a color of
his times.
In the sun’s light …’

George Oppen, Birthplace: New Rochelle

Wu Lan-Chiann

‘They have lost the metaphysical sense
Of the future, they feel themselves
The end of a chain
Of lives, singles lives
And we know that lives
Are single
And cannot defend
The metaphysic
On which rest
The boundaries
Of our distances.’

George Oppen, Of Being Numerous, 1968

‘To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong.
Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding.’

George Steiner

On Difficulty, and Other Essays, 1978

Caravaggio, Judith beheading Holofernes, 1598-99 (detail)

‘Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; …’

William Wordsworth,

Ode on Imitations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childwood, 1804

Mary Delany, Snowdrop 1777

‘And when we die,
All’s over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips (…)’

Rupert Brooke, The Hill, 1910

Frank Paulin, Lovers - New York Time Square, 1956

Life’s but a walking shadow, …’

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, scene 5

Thorben Ecke

‘There will always be some people who think for themselves.’

Immanuel Kant

Was ist Aufklärung (What is Enlightenment), 1784

Gérard Castello-Lopes, Algarve Portugal 1957

‘Nostalgie in reverse,
the longing for yet another strange land,
grew especially strong in spring.’

Vladimir Nabokov, Mary, 1926

Robert Doisneau

‘.. beauty is in the eye of the gazer.’

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847

Ikeda Rowswell