Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
“I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.”
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Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking:
“. . . the mind is also a landscape of sorts and . . . walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making.”
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Louise Nevelson:
“There is in every human being a desire for order. But the artist doesn’t have it ready-made. That is the search.”
“Creation basically is that you are searching for a more aware order.”
“Art is as alive as our breathing, as our own lives, but it’s more ordered.”
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Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era:
“Men engaged on research commonly suppose they are doing it because it is there to be done, like housecleaning; but the intuitions that drive them have frequently been divined by poets, the ventriloquists of social need.”
“For language creates characteristic force fields. A whole quality of apprehension inheres in its sounds and its little idioms.”
“Whoever can give his people better stories than the ones they live in is like the priest in whose hands common bread and wine become capable of feeding the very soul, and he may think of forging in some invisible smithy the uncreated conscience of his race.”
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Rob Rieman, Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal:
“To remain faithful to values is precisely why individuals must be open to change in forms.”