“There is nothing more attractive and convincing than spontaneity whether it is to be found in a child, in an artist, or in those individuals who cannot thus be grouped according to age or profession.”

            -Erich Fromm, from Escape From Freedom

Georgian Church Tower Bells

Afghanistan

“To create today is to create dangerously.  Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.  Hence the question is not to find out if this is or is not prejudicial to art.  The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies (how many churches, what solitude!), the strange liberty of creation is possible.”

            -From Resistance, Rebellion, and Death by Albert Camus

Louisiana Bayou

Photo by Ali

“Most of us can observe at least moments of our own spontaneity which are at the same time moments of genuine happiness.  Whether it be the fresh and spontaneous perception of a landscape, or the dawning of some truth as the result of our thinking, or a sensuous pleasure that is not stereotyped, or the welling up of love for another person – in these moments we all know what a spontaneous act is and may have some vision of what human life could be if these experiences were not such rare and uncultivated occurrences.”

            -Erich Fromm, from Escape From Freedom

Redbud

“Those of us accustomed to making life livable by superimposing over its inherent chaos various control mechanisms – habit, routine, structure, discipline – are always haunted by the disquieting awareness that something essential is lost in the clutch of control, some effervescent liveliness and loveliness elemental to what makes life not merely livable but worth living.  Perhaps the most succinct shorthand [to that control] is spontaneity.”

            -Maria Popova