Journal

"A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind." - Albert Einstein

“What we do is not different from who we are.” - Francisco Varela

"Everything breathes. The breath breathes, the heart pumps, the galaxies turn - it's all in flow. Right Understanding says that there is a different dimension of reality that is not dependent on changing conditions, but recognizing who you are is consciousness itself, is loving awareness, is the witness to the openings and closings, and joys and sorrows, and beginnings and endings that make up life. It's remembering something bigger, remembering who you really are." - Jack Kornfield

"There are two kinds of suffering: the kind you run away from that follows you everywhere, and the kind that you face, and that's the gateway to freedom." - Jack Kornfield

“All things in this world are linked together in one way or another and not a single thing comes into being without some relationship to every other thing.” - Nishitani Keiji

"When we can learn to take up residency in the domain of being, and the nature of our being as capable of inhabiting awareness in this way, then the kind of doing that comes out of these moments of being is an entirely different kind of doing, and it's just what the world in its suffering (...) is starving for." - Jon Kabat Zinn

“La vision du peintre est une naissance continuée.” -Maurice Merleau-Ponty, l'Oeil et l'Esprit

“Le peintre (...) pendant qu'il peint, pratique une théorique magique de la vision.”  -Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: some things are within our control, and some things are not. It is only after you have faced up to this fundamental rule and learned to distinguish between what you can and can't control that inner tranquility and outer effectiveness become possible.” - Epictetus

"Unhealthy sense of self is not flexible. It's fixed, wanting to control everything. It makes a lot of stress, a lot of pain, a lot of worry. Easy to hurt, easy to cry, easy to burn, easy to disappear. So, the unhealthy sense of self is like the ego: selfish. The healthy sense of self is more like connected - interconnected - like compassion and impermanence, wisdom. So once you're connected with the healthy sense of self, you cannot survive without others. You and others are interdependent." - Mingyur Rinpoche

"It's awareness that will hold different epistemologies, different ways of knowing, different narratives. It's awareness that can hold it all and can actually both discern and differentiate in ways that are illuminating and perhaps liberating. The vocabulary I've sort of fallen on over the years is the "boundless spaciousness" of your own heart, or your own awareness. And then of course the curriculum is whatever arises, inwardly or outwardly. And the challenge: how am I going to be in wise relationship to it? And who is that anyway? Who am I? What am I?" - Jon Kabat-Zinn

“If you are ever tempted to look for outside approval, realize that you have compromised your integrity. If you need a witness, be your own.” - Epictetus

“Work cures everything.” - Henri Matisse

“The reality of things is their light.” - Thomas Aquinas

“The most important part of education - to teach the meaning of to know (in the scientific sense).” - Simone Weil

“The universe in which we are living, and of which we form a tiny particle, is the distance put by Love between God and God. We are a point in this distance.” - Simone Weil

“Peace is not something you must hope for in the future. It is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present, you will never find it.” - Thomas Merton

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” - Marcus Aurelius

“Our salvation and our loss is in ourselves.” - Epictetus

“If an Angel deigns to come, it will be because you have convinced her, not by your tears, but by your humble resolve to be always beginning: to be a beginner.” - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Le temps n'est autre chose que la forme du sens interne, c'est-à-dire de l'intuition de nous même et de notre état intérieur.” - Emmanuel Kant, Critique de la Raison Pure, 1.1

“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth (...) No facts to me are sacred; none are profane. I simply experiment, an endless seeker (...) the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the emerging spirit.” - R.W. Emerson

“I have been asked, “Do you think you can wake up in this lifetime?” That’s really the question.” - Anne Klein

“To study the Buddha dharma is to study the self;

To study the self is to forget the self;

To forget the self is to be confirmed by the ten thousand things.” -Dogen

“Let's do a reflection: just see who comes to mind, when you consider who all was involved in any way in your sitting here (...) right now. Because each of us is brought here, it's like a confluence of relationship and conversation and connection (...). So who comes to mind? Maybe somebody gave you a book or told you about their experience, (...) read you a poem, played you a piece of music, so many beings. (...) And sometimes I do this reflection and I think about those people whose actions have really brought me to a kind of edge, where I felt like, I've got to find another way of seeing things or I'll never happy or I'll never be free because they're a part of why I'm sitting here right now too. That's this moment in time, that's every moment in time, we exist not only as ourselves, as individuals, but genuinely as part of a network of beings through the power of connection. To recognize that however cut off or alone we might feel at any given time, the truth is, we live in this world of interconnection, and the heart's response to that is lovingkindness and compassion.” - Sharon Salzberg

“The way in which education starts a man will determine his future life.” - Plato

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” - Goethe

“Courage is the commitment to begin without any guarantee of success.” - Goethe

“The subjective thinker is not a scientist-scholar. He is an artist. To exist is an art. The subjective thinker is esthetic enough for his life to have esthetic content, ethical enough to regulate it, dialectical enough in thinking to master it.” -Kierkegaard

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.” - Viktor Frankl

“I accept the universe.” - Margaret Fuller

“Injustice never rules forever.” - Seneca

“All cruelty springs from weakness.” - Seneca

“It is not death, but a bad life, which destroys the soul.” -Quintus Sextius

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” - Marcus Aurelius

 “Understand however that every man is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself.” – Marcus Aurelius

“Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.” - Marcus Aurelius

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” - Thomas Merton

“I will do nothing because of public opinion, but everything because of conscience.” - Seneca

“The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.” - Epictetus

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” - Gandhi

“The wise man lets go of all results, whether good or bad, and is focused on the action alone.” - Bhagavad Gita

“Content yourself with being a lover of wisdom, a seeker of the truth. Return and return again to what is essential and worthy.” - Epictetus

“Ask yourself at every moment, 'is this necessary?'” - Marcus Aurelius

“When you arise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love.” - Marcus Aurelius

“Get busy with life's purpose, toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue - if you care for yourself at all - and do it while you can.” - Marcus Aurelius

“A medical science for the mind does exist: it is philosophy.” - Cicero

“The mind is everything: what you think, you become.” - Buddha

“Let us prepare our minds as if we'd come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing.” - Seneca

“If you wish to experience peace, provide peace for another.” - Dalai Lama

“Ce qui compte, ce n'est pas le bonheur de tout le monde, c'est le bonheur de chacun.” - Boris Vian

“The truth is the whole.” - Hegel

“(...) Knowing itself remains partial and deformed if we do not develop and practice an epistemology of love instead of an epistemology of separation. Truth (...) eludes us if we bring to the world (...) an epistemology of separation only.” - Arthur Zajonc

 “Always go too far, because that is where you'll find the truth.” - Albert Camus

 “The only way to deal with an un-free world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” - Albert Camus

“Action is the foundational key to all success.” - Pablo Picasso

 “What matters to an active man is to do the right thing; whether the right thing comes to pass should not bother him.” - Goethe

“Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.” - Thomas Merton

“Silence is the mystery of the world to come, speech is the organ of this present world (...) Every man who delights in a multitude of words, even if he says admirable things, is empty within. Silence, however, will illuminate you in God and deliver you from the phantoms of ignorance. Silence will unite you with God himself.” - Saint Isaac of Nineveh

“cause there is no change without crisis, or is there?
some moments:
I met a man and he took me to his cabin by the lake. We took a long boat ride close to sunset, rowing. He’s so quiet and as I was observing him or rather my relation to him, asking: what makes that silence, how is that held?
I looked around me and saw the wind moving the trees, the openness and i realized that his sense of silence was not too different from the landscape we were in.
open, still, observant. Gave me an inkling into a way of life I had forgotten.
and I kind of fell in love with that.
the notion that life can be something other than the incessant pursuit of something else. that it’s about being present.” - Michael Taussig, The Corn Wolf (147)

“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” - Philippians (4:8)

“Were you to live three thousand years, or even a countless multiple of that, keep in mind that no one ever loses a life other than the one they are living, and no one ever lives a life other than the one they are losing. The longest and the shortest life, then, amount to the same, for the present moment lasts the same for all and is all anyone possesses. No one can lose either the past or the future, for how can someone be deprived of what’s not theirs?” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.14

“I wish I had realized sooner that instead, essentially everything in life was the result of a decision. The need for decisions requires that there be uncertainty about something, and uncertainty suggests that things are mutable. This realization opens up all sorts of possibilities for you, if you make your own decisions. Decisions are made by people who are at the least fallible and, whether you own your decisions or cede them to others, you might win or lose. But the worst case scenario is giving up what feels right and losing. If you make own your decisions, it’s always a win. (...) Life only consists of moments. If you make the moment matter by making decisions that are meaningful to you, your life will matter. More important, over time your life will have been fully lived.” - Ellen Langer

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.” - Albert Einstein

“There are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself, accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it and love is smiling through all things. (...) No one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end.” - Tree of Life (2011), Terrence Malick

“Vous savez, l'interprétation de la vie ne dépend que de nous. Et la société essaie souvent de nous dominer en nous forçant à interpréter les choses de telle ou telle manière. Plus jeune, je voulais vivre une vie de réussite, couronnée par l'argent et les succès massifs. Puis je me suis aperçu que cette vie n'était pas adaptée à mes désirs profonds, que ce n'était pas un bon cadre pour moi. J'ai cherché à avoir une interprétation personnelle de la vie, de ma propre vie. Il est important que cette interprétation ne soit pas la même pour tout le monde. C'est la même chose avec les films et avec les mode de narration que j'utilise. Je crois que la lourdeur de certaines intentions et de certaines descriptions nous fatigue d'une vie qui, en réalité, n'est pas si tragique. Il suffit de peu pour voir la vie sous un angle joyeux. Mais à travers l'idéologie qui domine le cinéma actuel, cette joie est réduite en miettes et il ne reste qu'une angoisse dont on ne sait pas trop quoi faire. Finalement, il n'est pas sûr qu'on voie vraiment ce qui est en face de nous. (...) Nous, êtres humains, sommes limités par la langue. Il nous faut trouver d'autres voies pour communiquer. Je crois qu'il ne faut pas être obsédé par la langue. Nous sommes tellement dépendants de la langue que nous devenons vite tendus par la crainte de ne pas être compris. Je suis assis en face de vous, je fais un entretien, et je me dis que je dois absolument réussir et être intelligible, sinon ce sera préjudiciable pour mes films à venir. Je construis une narration qui me détache un peu de la réalité. Mais quand je vais au plus profond de cette narration et que j'enlève une à une les couches constituées par cette crainte, je me dis que, finalement, la situation est plus simple qu'elle n'en a l'air. Mon film, par exemple, pourrait être résumé par une sorte de proverbe : 'On ne vit sa vie qu'une seule fois, donc si on la rate, c'est foutu.' Mais surtout, si je relâche un peu la pression, je peux enfin prendre le temps de voir à quoi vous ressemblez, j'aperçois les gens qui passent derrière les rideaux, j'arrive enfin à éprouver des sensations plutôt que d'être obsédé par cet entretien.” - Hong Sang-Soo, extrait d'entretien accordé aux Cahiers du Cinéma, Oct. 2012, n°682, pg. 28-29

“Au départ, mon travail, c'est la peur de la chute. Par la suite, c'est devenu l'art de la chute, comme tomber sans se faire mal. Puis l'art d'être ici, en ce lieu.” - Louise Bourgeois

“Dieu se rit (sourit) de ceux qu'il voit dénoncer les maux dont ils sont la cause.” -Baudrillard, Cool Memories V 

“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.” - Kafka

“Connais-toi toi-même et tu connaîtras l'univers et les Dieux.” - Socrates

“Everything that can be conceived has a value of equal life, which is susceptible to each faculty of appropriation. I do not need to care about making this better or worse than this or that thing, nor of employing this or that procedure rather than another. To have confidence in that which truly expresses my emotion. To invent is to state, to see.” – Édouard Vuillard

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” - Max Planck

“La joie absurde par excellence, c'est la création.” – Albert Camus

“Quand bien même toutes les idées seraient de nature à nous décevoir, je ne me proposerai pas moins, en commençant, de leur consacrer ma vie.” - André Breton, Les Pas Perdus

“There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.” – Fellini

“When you sing with your voice, a moment comes when you stop singing; then it is the moment to begin singing with your life, and you will never stop singing.” - Saint Augustine

“Our pilgrimage on earth cannot be exempt from trial. We progress by means of trial. No one knows himself except through trial, or receives a crown except after victory.” - Saint Augustine

“The lens through which I view the world is fundamentally about the presence of a divine spark in all people in this world amidst great brokenness and despair. I believe very much in the idea that the Kingdom of Heaven is here - all around us already, all the time - and that we are in it.” - Lear DeBessonet

“For me, this is a moment in time when having access to our humanity - our common humanity - and a sense of empathy, and what it is that is our sort of fundamental human predicament, is the key to finding a way to move forward.” - Lear DeBessonet

“Day by day, what you choose, what you think, and what you do is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny, it is the light that guides your way.” - Heraclitus

“Start by doing what's necessary; then by doing what's possible; then suddenly your are doing the impossible.” - Saint François d'Assis

“La politique est le moyen pour des hommes sans principes de diriger des hommes sans mémoire.” - Voltaire

“Tant que nous sommes vivants, nous pouvons nous perfectionner et servir l'humanité. Mais nous ne pouvons servir l'humanité qu'en nous perfectionnant, et nous perfectionner qu'en servant l'humanité.” - Léon Tolstoï

“Don't sow your desires in someone else's garden; just cultivate your own as best you can; don't long to be other than what you are, but desire to be thoroughly what you are. Direct your thoughts to being very good at that and to bearing the crosses, little or great, that you will find there. Believe me, this is the most important and least understood point to the spiritual life. We all love according to what is our taste; few people like what is according to their duty or to God's liking. What is the use of building castles in Spain when we have to live in France?” - Saint François de Sales

“Maybe we are here to enhance ourselves spiritually. If our life tends to this spiritual enrichment, then art is a means to get there. Art should help man in this process.” - Andrei Tarkovsky

“The pursuit of knowledge, if it's to go very, very far, is inextricably related to the pursuit of virtue. And the pursuit of virtue is inextricably related to the pursuit of happiness.”  -Alan Wallace, cited in The Dalai Lama at MIT, Anne Harrington, 10.

“You must put confidence in the big mind which is always with you. You should be able to appreciate things as an expression of big mind. This is more than faith. This is ultimate truth which you cannot reject.” - Shunryu Suzuki

“...The point is not to try to get rid of thoughts, but rather to see their true nature. Thoughts will run us around in circles if we buy into them, but really they are like dream images. They are an illusion- not really all that solid. They are, as we say, just thinking.”  -Pema Chödrön

“At our Zen center, we often chant the words: 'just in this moment, compassion's way'. Just this moment, including perhaps terror, but also potentially liberation. For in truth, just this moment is the only moment and being open to it is the only true choice we ever really have.” - Diane Eshin Rizzetto

“The source of wisdom is whatever is going to happen to us today. (...) Now is the time. If there's any possibility for enlightenment, it's right now, not at some future time. Now is the only time. How we relate to it creates the future. (...) What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now.”  -Pema Chödrön

“Whatever you do, this attitude is necessary: Sometimes we say nyu nan shin, 'soft or flexible mind.' Nyu is 'soft feeling'; nan is 'something which is not hard'; shin is 'mind.' Nyu nan shin means a smooth, natural mind. When you have that mind, you have the joy of life. When you lose it, you lose everything. You have nothing. Although you think you have something, you have nothing. But when all you do comes out of nothingness, then you have everything.” - Shunryu Suzuki 

“Compassion is the natural outgrowth of embracing one's own suffering.” - Dean Rolston

“The universe (...) is a machine for the making of God.”  -Henri Bergson, Morality and Religion

“I paint not the things I see but the feelings they arouse in me.” - Franz Kline

“Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment.” - Sam Francis

“La peinture (...) donne existence visible à ce que la vision profane croit invisible.” - Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“If (...) we want to bring to light the birth of being for us, we must finally look at the area of our expertise which clearly has significance only for us, and that is our affective life.” - Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Nothing great is ever achieved without much enduring.” - Saint Catherine of Siena

“Il faut que la pensée de science - pensée de survol, pensée de l'object en général - se replace dans un "il y a" préalable, dans le site, sur le sol du monde sensible et du monde ouvré tels qu'ils sont dans notre vie, pour notre corps, non pas ce corps possible dont il est loisible de soutenir qu'il est machine à information, mais ce corps actuel que j'appelle mien, la sentinelle qui se tient silencieusement sous mes paroles et sous mes actes. Il faut qu'avec mon corps se réveillent les corps associés, les "autres", qui ne sont pas mes congénères, comme dit la zoologie, mais qui me hantent, que je hante, avec qui je hante un seul Etre actuel, présent, comme jamais animal n'a hanté ceux de son espèce, son territoire ou son milieu. Dans cette historicité primordiale, la pensée allègre et improvisatrice de la science apprendra à s'appesantir sur les choses mêmes et sur soi-même, redeviendra philosophie...

Or l'art et notamment la peinture puisent à cette nappe de sens brut dont l'activisme ne veut rien savoir. Ils sont même seuls à le faire en toute innocence. (...) Comme s'il y avait dans l'occupation du peintre une urgence qui passe toute autre urgence. Il est là, fort ou faible dans la vie, mais souverain sans conteste dans sa rumination du monde, sans autre "technique" que celle que ses yeux et ses mains se donnent à force de voir, à force de peindre (...). Quelle est donc cette science secrète qu'il a ou qu'il cherche ? Cette dimension selon laquelle Van Gogh veut aller "plus loin" ? Ce fondamental de la peinture, et peut-être de toute la culture ?” - Maurice Merleau-Ponty, l'Oeil et l'Esprit

“If man is ever to solve the problem of politics in practice, he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” - Friedrich von Schiller

“Polarity wasn't anymore this and that side, but something that we had collectively constructed. Literally a collective action that we had all done. As this became more and more clear to me, it dawned on me that whatever my stances had been, or whatever somebody else's opinion had been (...) were fragments that constituted this whole (...). That all of the sudden it revealed a craziness. Total craziness. I mean, this is somewhat as when literally someone is really crazy. You see the mind completely out, the brain turned upside down or inside out. Well, this was like that, except (...) a whole country (...). That's what my actual experience was (...). And you see, the craziness, the way in which there was a collective pattern in which I was responsible, everybody was, and in which my views couldn't anymore signify anything except that piece of a larger puzzle for which I really didn't have any answer.

(...) I sat down and wrote some twenty or so pages that I entitled "The Logic of Paradise," because it seemed to me for the first time that this had a logic to it. The whole thing had an intrinsic logic that was essentially good, in that it gave me a handle on what paradise is, for the first time. I know that might sound strange, but that is what it felt like - that being rooted in the complete chaos and killing, out of that was emerging a completely inverse understanding. And I was too scared or something to resist it. So somehow it just got transformed into these pages.

Now, that experience is what was given to me, is what I have had to deal with ever since. Because it revealed to me the connection between the world view, political action, and personal transformation. It revealed to me, in a way that I knew but really didn't know, that I somehow vaguely understood but hadn't experienced, that unless I was able to cut through my sense of identity and attachment and identification with what I believe are my ideas, my things, my territory, my limits, I had no hope of understanding what the hell was going on. And it literally turned my life inside out. What that experience told me was: 'Unless you build on the foundation of working with that sense of spirituality, (what later on I began to understand was what religions are talking about), unless you build on that base there is simply no hope of understanding.' 

I have found, for myself, expression of that understanding in Buddhist practice. I cannot separate that from political action and from what my understanding of the world is. I suppose this is why I become so passionate about issues on epistemology. (...)

So it is not an abstract proposition for me when I say that we must incorporate in the enactment, in the projecting out of our world views, at the same time the sense in which that projection is only one perspective, that it is a relative frame, that it must contain a way to undo itself. And unless we find a way of creating expressions of that nature, we are going to be constantly going around the same circle. Whether that can be done or not I do not know. (...) My deep conviction is that we must try to see to what extent our political views and our projections on the world can express this form of relativity, the fact that every position we take will also contain the opposite one. That ultimately I cannot follow a form of political action that is based on truth anymore. I cannot say that my political stance is true as opposed to yours, which is false. But every political stance contains the elements on which the truth of the other is based, and that all we are doing is a little dance. 

Sure, I have to take this side, and that is cool, but how do I really embody in that action that I acknowledge the importance of the other side and the essential brotherhood between these two positions? (...)

I am going to end here by summarizing this theme that is one of my major concerns: I don't believe anymore in the notion of a cultural revolution in the sense that one form of politics and knowledge and religion is superseded by a new one.  If I am interested in doing anything at this point, it is in creating a form of culture, knowledge, religion, or politics that does not view itself as replacing another, in any sense, but one that can contain in itself a way of undoing itself.”  -Francisco Varela, "Reflections on the Chilean Civil War"

“Il faut noter ensuite que les afflictions et l'infortune ont pour origine principale l'amour excessif pour un être qui change et varie tout le temps et dont nous ne pouvons jamais être maître. En effet, on a tourment ou anxiété pour cela seul que l'on aime ; les offenses, soupçons, intimités, etc., naissent uniquement de l'amour pour des êtres que personne ne peut réellement posséder. Ainsi, nous comprenons facilement le pouvoir qu'a sur les sentiments la connaissance claire et distincte, et avant tout notre troisième genre de connaissance dont la base est la connaissance même de Dieu ; cette connaissance ne supprime absolument pas les sentiments-passions, mais elle fait qu'ils constituent la plus petite partie de l'esprit. De plus, cette connaissance engendre l'amour envers un être immuable et éternel que nous pouvons posséder réellement, et qui ne peut être souillé par aucun des vices inhérents à l'amour ordinaire, mais qui peut devenir de plus en plus grand, qui peut occuper la plus grande partie de l'esprit et l'affecter très amplement.” - Spinoza, Éthique, Vème partie, Scolie de la proposition 20

“Even though we act most of the time as if we are living on the same level of reality, if for example we ask really concrete questions, keep on asking the same questions, we realize that we are not on the same level of reality (...) We want to believe that we are living on the same reality, but reality can never be captured, we are just living on the cloud, but we want to live together out of necessity, so we have made some kind of contract that we pretend to (...) live in the same reality. For example, we can share one ice cream, we can talk about the taste of it for one hundred years and I will never know what it feels like, this ice cream (...) so the taste of this ice cream we can never share, we just pretend we know how it feels (...) So reality is not there for us to capture, we are just living as a human being within the limitations of human sensation. So I'm curious, always interested in the so-called reality, because of that interest I feel freer (...)” - Hong Sang-Soo, Q&A at NYFF55, 2017

“Then what do you believe in?
That I'm not the master of myself,
That I'm not a leading character,
not in the least.
And second, that I can die at any time.
I really believe that's okay.
Third, that everything is okay.
That actually everything is beautiful, always.
I believe in this world.” - The Day After, 2017, Hong Sang-Soo