The Saunterer

John Wooden on getting better

    John Wooden believed in going after evolutionary not revolutionary improvement:

    When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur. Not tomorrow, not the next day, but eventually a big gain is made. Don't look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That's the only way it happens—and when it happens it lasts.

    (Quoted from page 143 of Wooden: A lifetime of observations and reflections on and off the court. Contemporary, 1997.)
For a brief biography of John Wooden, click here. For images of or relating John Wooden, click here.

Gustave Flaubert on loving nature

    How much like Flaubert are you?

    You tell me that you are falling more and more in love with nature. My own passion for it is becoming uncontrollable. At times I look on animals and even trees with a tenderness that amounts to a feeling of affinity.

    (Quoted from page 286 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Gustave Flaubert, click here. For images of or relating Gustave Flaubert, click here.

David Bowie on using art as a stable nourishment

    It’s how David Bowie used art, he once explained:

    I collected very early on. I have a couple of Tintorettos, which I’ve had for many, many years. I have a Rubens. Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings. The same work can change me in different ways, depending on what I’m going through. For instance, somebody I like very much indeed is Frank Auerbach. I think there are some mornings that if we hit each other a certain way—myself and a portrait by Auerbach—the work can magnify the kind of depression I’m going through. It will give spiritual weight to my angst. Some mornings I’ll look at it and go: “Oh, God, yeah! I know!” But that same painting, on a different day, can produce in me an incredible feeling of the triumph of trying to express myself as an artist. I can look at it and say: “My God, yeah! I want to sound like that looks.”

    (David Bowie in an interview published in The New York Times on June 14, 1998.)
    For a brief biography of David Bowie, click here. For images of or relating to David Bowie, click here.