Eugene J. Martin (1938 – 2005)
African American visual artist.
As have the Chinese and English Languages, Eugene has stripped his grammer to the naked bone, sinewed the simple frame, and created a rich vocabulary of meaning, sight and emotion. Yet, always there is discipline.
Rather than studying the laws of cause and effect, people spend their lives being the effect and running from the cause.
People find it easy to justify their frustration in the struggle to manipulate others, but find it hard to justify the struggle for their own growth.
Having a sincere desire to want growth does not mean at that point you are committing yourself to growth.
People fight not because they disagree,but because they don’t know they agree.
Just as feelings grow out of ignorance, intuition should grow out of knowledge.
The bird of truth would not be able to fly if it weren't for the air of lies we breathe.
Rather than programming children as if they were computers, parents should be something like art instructors. Because life is like a clump-of-clay, you can’t make it into an expression of beauty, unless you take it into your hands. While sprinkling their lives with painful and playful diversions, people wait their lives miserably into old age, for the skills to live-life, to–come as did life- itself.
Defensive thinkers best defend themselves from knowing who they are.
All things – great, small, good, bad, friend, enemy—should be a lesson, not an obsession.
Beware of the possible reason some people are honestly down and out - it is because they tried to copy the many who are superficially doing well.
The more fortunate people among us would surely think we are civilized, but the less fortunate among us are a reminder that we’re not.
MUSEUM
They came, they looked, they walked
their eyes wide open
they didn’t see
because their minds were closed
Their eyes wide open
they didn’t know they couldn’t see
because their minds were closed;
so they looked, and left.
Vanity begins and ends with deception, so the reason people put interesting and attractive clothes on their bodies is perhaps the same for having uninteresting and unattractive expressions on their faces.
Genius does not only require superior knowledge and skill, but also superior patience.
Most writers are successful in getting their readers’ attention, but fail at getting them to think. If you’re asked to explain anything philosophical to anyone, the chances are great their understanding will be superficial; it’s best they don’t understand than to think they do, so encourage them to grow into understanding and don’t hand them too much explanation.
'It’s a great tragedy that the ability to act is used to manipulate people, but it is a greater tragedy that people welcome it while sometimes making a phony protest.
Technology has not advanced because people are starved for instruments to make a better civilization, but because they are starved for entertainment – technology is still mostly a toy factory for grown-ups.
It’s past time that people get involved in thinking – now that the computers can take over the field of memory.
Can someone eat the fruit that comes from the tree of action that grows from the seeds of your mind?