Peter Witkin Quotes

#1. [On ascending the platform to his execution] I pray you, I pray you, Mr Lieutenant, see me safe up and for my coming down, I can shift for myself.

Thomas More

#2. My work would have the impact of my unreality - my doubts ...

Joel-Peter Witkin

#3. To me extreme things are like miracles. There is nothing as boring as a person who is just okay. But I could easily live in a world populated with these disjunctive, bizarre things ... I operate out of confusion, towards clarity.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#4. I've come to realize that the mark is the primal gesture, the internal connection of the caveman to the cosmos; an impossibility similar to an impulse in an insect's nervous system that it could somehow reduce to dust a steel beam by endlessly crawling over it.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#5. Extreme things are like miracles. Nothing is as boring as a person who is just okay.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#6. We are moved to respond to the fact of human brilliance, human depth in all its variety because it is the most wonderful thing in the world, very probably the most wonderful thing in the universe.

Marilynne Robinson

#7. The secret of Sufism is that it has no secret at all'.

Idries Shah

#8. I have consecrated my life to changing matter into spirit with the hope of someday seeing it all.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#9. Let go of the place that holds, let go of the place that controls, let go of the place that fears. Just let the ground support me.

Stephanie Kaza

#10. When we can't piece together the puzzle of our own lives, remember the best view of a puzzle is from above. Let Him help put you together.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#11. It's ironic, isn't it, that one day you're one of the most conservative members, and then some individual gets mad at you, and they decide to throw millions of dollars against you because you didn't vote exactly the way they want every day.

James Lankford

#12. Child of our time, our times have robbed your cradle. Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken.

Eavan Boland

#13. I wanted my photographs to be as powerful as the last thing a person sees or remembers before death.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#14. The only meaningful statistic in warfare is when the other side quits.

Karl Marlantes

#15. I could easily live in a world populated with disjunctive, bizarre things ...

Joel-Peter Witkin

#16. I never photograph anything I don't believe in. If I love working with death, it's because even in death I find this power of reality that no sculptor or painter could recreate, not even a Michelangelo or a Da Vinci.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#17. Artists are the people among us who realize creation didn't stop on the sixth day.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#18. No man is hurt but by himself," said Diogenes.

Maxwell Maltz

#19. I love that after a day when nothing is sure, and when I say 'nothing' I mean nothing, you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. It's such a comfort.

Julie Powell

#20. My purpose is to acknowledge the wonder of being part of Creation. Though I myself don't create anything, I make from what has been created.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#21. Search for meaning, eat, sleep. Search for meaning, eat, sleep. Die, search for meaning, search for meaning, search for meaning.

Douglas Horton

#22. She was the most precious thing in the world to him. So beautiful, so sweet, so giving and too damn good for him, but he was a selfish bastard and wouldn't let her go.

R.L. Mathewson

#23. If there is pain in my photographs, it relates to the pain in my own existence.

Joel-Peter Witkin