" all collections are art, at least for the person that assembles them " Susan Hiller

'Every superior human being will aspire to his secret citadel' 

Friedrich Nietzche

He was enthralled to have found the strength that brings serenity, to have overcome ambition, or at least to have set it aside, ambition which lessons the pleasure of being human and inserts a timidity into every thought of it. Honors and esteem - by all means let others enjoy them.

Something about Goethe, Robert Walser, Speaking to the Rose, Writings, 1912 - 1932

Life as the product of life. However far man may extend himself with his knowledge, however objective he may appear himself - ultimately he reaps nothing but his own biography.              

 Friedrich Nietzsche

“To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.”
Albert Camus

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

Albert Camus

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”  

Albert Camus

John Clare "I am"

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;            

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

John Clare

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships , islands, fishes, rooms, instrument, stars, horses and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

Jorge Luis Borges

Interiority is indeed the key
to the mentality of the authentic Outsider,
whose work is predominately shaped
by musing and imagining.
It is in this sense that the artwork
asserts its existence, first and foremost,
as a refuge,
a defensive citadel
an intimate nest

from Inner Worlds Outside exhibition catalogue 

Whitechapel Gallery

Its when a man finds himself alone,
sinking into boredom,
when he cannot count on any sort of distraction
or pleasure coming from outside himself,
that the conditions are ripe
for the emergence within him
of an impulse to construct entirely
independently and exploiting
his own own personal use

Jean Dubuffet

Few are made for independence - it is a privilege of the strong. And he who attempts it, having the completest right to it but without being compelled to, thereby proves that he is probably not only strong but also daring to the point of recklessness. He ventures into a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers which life as such already brings with it, not the smallest of which is that no one can behold how and where he goes astray, is cut off from others, and is torn to pieces limb from limb by some cave minotaur of conscience. If such one is destroyed, it takes place so far from the understanding of men that they neither feel it nor sympathize - and he can no longer go back! He can no longer go back even to pity of men!

Friedrich Nietzsche

A terrible weariness fills the soul of my heart. I feel sad for whom I never was, and I don't know with what kind of nostalgia I miss him. I fell, with every sunset, against my hopes and certainties.

Fernando Pessoa

Solitary people: Some people are so used to solitude with themselves that they never compare themselves to others, but spin forth their monologue of a life in a calm joyous mood, holding good conversations with themselves, even laughing.

Thus one must grant certain men their solitude and not be silly enough, as often happens, to pity them for it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

while you wait to make the choice of life you neglect to live.... we are not enquiring for the world but for ourselves

'Such said', Nekayah, " is the state of life, that none such are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing: when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something to-morrow which i never saw before"

The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson