The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
—Wendell Barry
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
—Paul Valéry
When we stand beneath the night sky, we stand beneath the history of the whole of creation. It is a miracle that so much of it is perceptible—a miracle we might appreciate more if it had not occurred and we did not have senses to discern it.
—Richard Grossinger
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
—Carl Sagan in Cosmos
Everyone is as God has made him, and oftentimes a great deal worse.
—Miguel de Cervantes
If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness.… The whole show has been on fire from the word go.
—Annie Dillard
Reality is above all else a variable, and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows what it is. As a matter of fact, with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.
—Margaret Halsey
In the beginning there was nothing. God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.
—Ellen DeGeneres
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
—Isaac Bashevis Singer
All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.
—John Stuart Mill
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
—Frank Zappa
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
—George Santayana
You don't take a photograph, you make it.
—Ansel Adams
God creates men, but they choose each other.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry