Forward movement Quotes

“When the urge to knock on a door strikes, it's your soul's desire for forward movement. So knock!”

“We make our own destiny, not because we can see the road ahead, but because we cannot see the road ahead. It is the road, the motion, the forward movement, that takes us to ourselves.”

“So what if you're scared spitless? So what if you're intimidated, insecure or inundated with doubt? If it's the thing that will advance you, do it anyway. Forward movement always begins with an inward decision.”

“I also rise today in strong support of forward movement on the implementation of health information technology, which has the potential to save the United States billions of dollars in health care costs each year.”

“If only we can agree that us mortal human beings only have relevance when there are opposing forces and ideas then we would not be so consumed with tribalism. It is our focus on what others do or say that gives them meaning and relevance. Light that points to the clear sky is consumed by darkness.. In the absence of a reflective object light has no relevance.. Friction/resistance is necessary for forward movement.”

“Because this painting has never been restored there is a heightened poignance to it somehow; it doesn’t have the feeling of unassailable permanence that paintings in museums do.There is a small crack in the lower left, and a little of the priming between the wooden panel and the oil emulsions of paint has been bared. A bit of abrasion shows, at the rim of a bowl of berries, evidence of time’s power even over this—which, paradoxically, only seems to increase its poetry, its deep resonance. If you could see the notes of a cello, when the bow draws slowly and deeply across its strings, and those resonant reverberations which of all instruments’ are nearest to the sound of the human voice emerge—no, the wrong verb, they seem to come into being all at once, to surround us, suddenly, with presence—if that were made visible, that would be the poetry of Osias Beert.But the still life resides in absolute silence.Portraits often seem pregnant with speech, or as if their subjects have just finished saying something, or will soon speak the thoughts that inform their faces, the thoughts we’re invited to read. Landscapes are full of presences, visible or unseen; soon nymphs or a stag or a band of hikers will make themselves heard.But no word will ever be spoken here, among the flowers and snails, the solid and dependable apples, this heap of rumpled books, this pewter plate on which a few opened oysters lie, giving up their silver.These are resolutely still, immutable, poised for a forward movement that will never occur. The brink upon which still life rests is the brink of time, the edge of something about to happen. Everything that we know crosses this lip, over and over, like water over the edge of a fall, as what might happen does, as any of the endless variations of what might come true does so, and things fall into being, tumble through the progression of existing in time.Painting creates silence. You could examine the objects themselves, the actors in a Dutch still life—this knobbed beaker, this pewter salver, this knife—and, lovely as all antique utilitarian objects are, they are not, would not be, poised on the edge these same things inhabit when they are represented.These things exist—if indeed they are still around at all—in time. It is the act of painting them that makes them perennially poised, an emergent truth about to be articulated, a word waiting to be spoken. Single word that has been forming all these years in the light on the knife’s pearl handle, in the drops of moisture on nearly translucent grapes: At the end of time, will that word be said?”