“A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

"It is a most certain truth, that the richer we see ourselves to be, confessing at the same time our poverty, the greater will be our progress, and the more real our humility."

— Saint Teresa of Avila

"I too play with symbols... but I play in such a way that I do not forget that I am playing. For nothing is proved by symbols... unless by sure reasons it can be demonstrated that they are not merely symbolic but are descriptions of the ways in which the two things are connected and of the causes of this connection.""

— JOHANNES KEPLER

“You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship.”

— N.T. Wright

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love."

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being."

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

“If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

“...before the origin of things, geometry was coeternal with the Divine Mind”

— JOHANNES KEPLER

"Sad songs, make sad people happy"

— Unknown

“There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”

— G. K. Chesterton

“To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless."

— G. K. Chesterton

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

— G. K. Chesterton

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions."

— G.K. Chesterton

“There’s an intrinsic value in creating something for the sake of creating it.”

— Rodney Mullen

"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

— C.S. Lewis

“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

“Any eyes on me – a late-night street sweeper, some dude texting in his parked car, the homeless guy talking to himself – make me feel uncomfortable when I skate. Everyone expects me to do certain things.”

— Rodney Mullen

“Modern mass culture, aimed at the 'consumer', the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

"Prayer does not change God, but changes him who prays."

— Soren Kierkagaard

Touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth which prompted the artist to his creative act. When a link is established between the work and its beholder, the latter experiences a sublime, purging trauma."

— Andrei Tarkovsky

“A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

— Martin Luther King Jr.

“As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will remain filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain addicted to putting people and things in their "right" place.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

“You build something but you cant live in the house because you sit around guarding it.”

— Rodney Mullen

“Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

“Some sort of pressure must exist; the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

“You don't think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

“The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

“I think a person needs to learn from childhood to find himself alone. It means to not be bored when you’re by yourself, because a person who finds himself bored when alone – as it seems to me – is in danger.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

“Who are you? What is your distinct contribution? That is so valuable whether it gets you anything or not. Trophies? Doesn’t matter. If you know you did it, that’s what keeps you going, you know? Success is illusive.”

— Rodney Mullen

"Relationships are the spiritual work of the West"

— Eckharte Tolle