Jasper Johns Quotes

Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me

Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things...as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value.

I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.

Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him.

I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.

The challenge is always to find the ultimate in the ordinary horseshit.

I don't spend a lot of time judging anyone I play. Even if their function in the script is to be the villain, I concentrate on what their perspective of the events is. Not even to justify them.

I had the attitude that I would work with this present-day material and do the best I could to describe it with photography, not intending to make any particular comment about whether it was good or bad or whether I liked it or not. It was just there, and I was interested in it. That's what I still do today.

Sometimes the most ordinary things are the ones we learn to miss the most.

You can find something truly important in an ordinary minute.

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

Do not try to do extraordinary things but do ordinary things with intensity.

Day-to-day things, the mundane, are what keeps the motor running. How extraordinary the ordinary really is, a tool we all use to keep going, a template for sanity.

Once you attach your personality to a proposition, people start reacting to the personality and stop reacting to the proposition.

Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

Typically to get toward a productive outcome in negotiation you have to make the initial move of genuinely exploring someone's model. If you don't, it is unlikely that they will be willing to explore yours. And if you genuinely explore and understand theirs - without judging it - they will be willing to explore yours. Once they reach that point, they are primed to explore the productive combination of both models and won't be as obsessed about trying to make sure their model prevails.

Don't think or judge, just listen.

And this do I call immaculate perception of all things: to want nothing else from them, but to be allowed to lie before them as a mirror with a hundred facets.

May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.

It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is a proper judge of it

I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.

There is tremendous life and personality in a name. It should be at least as agonized over as any character trait.

Adhere to the Truth rather than to the personality, and take to heart the Truth rather than the authority of another.

The Ordinary Life: the misery seems planned, the happiness accidental.