THOMAS CUMMINS ART

REVELATIONS
HOME
KEY WORKS
WRITING
PORTFOLIO
ARTIST STATEMENT

MEANING

"There is no meaning: things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them- there is nothing." -Sartre

"There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so." -Shakespeare

KNOWLEDGE

"Science is perhaps the only human activity in which errors are systematically criticized and... in time, corrected." -Popper

"All we can do is search for the falsity content of our best theory." -Popper

"Only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumalation of facts." -Einstein

"Common sense is the best distributed commodity in the world, for every man is convinced he is well supplied with it." -Descartes

"Common sense is not so common." -Voltaire

FREEDOM

"Man was born free, and everywhere he is chains." -Rousseau

"Men are deceived if they think themselves free." -Spinoza

"Motives are causes experienced from within." -Hume

"Man is caught in continuous cycles." -Kafka

"We are what we repeatedly do." -Aristotle

"Custom, then, is the great guide of human life." -Hume

"I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves." -Thoureau

"Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things." -Thoureau

"My townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited... for these are more easily acquired than got rid of." -Thoureau

"We are possessions of our own possessions."

CHOICE

PHILOSOPHY

RELIGION

SOCIETY

"But where ever a man goes, men will persue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society." -Rousseau

"Social man lives constantly outside himself." -Rousseau

SELF

SIMPLICITY

"The two simple rules for life: Know thyself. Take nothing in excess." -Socrates

"Our life is frittered away with detail... Simplify, simplify."

"In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness."

"I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born." -Thoureau

"Seek simplicity and distrust it." -Alfred North Whitehead

"A condition of complete simplicity (costing no less than everything)." -T. S. Eliot

"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler." -Einstein

"You can never lose what you never had." -Dican

"We are only free to do anything once we've lost everything." -Tyler Durdan

"Happiness follows simplicity."

HAPPINESS

"Happiness is not necessarily a good thing but rather a numb state of contentment."

"Bliss is ignorance."

"Because happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination." -Kant

"That is happiness- to be dissolved into something complete and great." -Willa Cather

"All life is suffering." -Buddha

"Desire is the root of all suffering." -Buddha

"If this is the best of all possible worlds... what are the others like." -Voltaire

"Maybe this world is another world's hell." -Adolous Huxley

"The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible." -Bertrand Russel

"Optimism is a mania for saying all is well when one is in hell." -Voltaire

"Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness."

"There will always be happiness and misery in every life. The question is how much."

"To get to hell you have to go through heaven."

"No pain means the end of feeling: each of our joys is a bargain with the devil." -Bukowski

"The devil has put a penalty on all."

"I got only my labour for my pains. However in this case my pains were their own reward." -Thoureau

"The formula for my happiness: a yes, a no, a staight line, a goal." -Nietzche

"Happiness... it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort." -Van Gogh

"Happiness- an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another." -Ambrose Bierce

"I was angered, for I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet." -Chinese Proverb

"Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived." -Johnathan Swift

RESOLUTION

"There is but one truly philosphical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy." -Camus

"Get busy living or get busy dying."

"If you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water."

"The secret of life is to find the thing you love the most and put all of your heart and energy into it."

"Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself."

"You can't choose where you came from but you can choose where you're headed."

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways: the point is to change it." -Marx

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep." -Thoureau

"Seize the day."

"Taste everything." -Hemingway

"The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of life is to live life dangerously." -Nietzche

"The meaning of life is to give life meaning."

"Life is thought backwards, but it must be lived forwards." -Kierkegaard

"Life is what happens to you when your busy making other plans." -John Lennon

"The great thing is, if one can, stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions in one's "own" or "real" life. The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one's life." -C.S. Lewis

"When making your choice in life do not neglect to live it." -Samuel Johnson

"Don't take life to seriously, nobody gets out alive anyways."

"In the end, the king and the pawn go back in the same box." -Italian Proverb

QUOTE BONEYARD

"The past is always present." -Michael Ray Charles

invmono.jpg

invmono.jpg

Thomas Cummins art philosophy