North

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis - Andante (Sonata II) - 1907

Piet Mondrian - Moulin le soir - 1908

Kuno Veeber - Windmill - 1918

The Gardener

"Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!"

Nietzsche, Daybreak, 1881

Piet Mondrian - Golden-Banded Lily - 1909-1910

Georgia O'Keeffe - Black Iris - 1926

Emil Nolde -  Alpenveilchen - 1935-1940
via ALONGTIMEALONE

"It is not by dealing out cold justice to the circle of my ideas that I can make them grow, but by cherishing and tending them as I would the flowers in my garden."
C. S. Peirce, Evolutionary Love, 1893

As Homeland

"The quintessential paradox of the epic resides in the fact that the notion of homeland is opposed to myth - which the fascists would falsely present as homeland."

Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944
quoted here

Paul Signac - Mont Saint-Michel. Brume et soleil - 1897

via VISION 

Wenzel Hablik - Wonder of the Sea - 1917

Nicholas Roerich - Nagarjuna conqueror of the Serpent - 1925

The Center of Universal Life

"Our renovated consciousness forbid us to consider man as the centre of universal life. The pain of a man is as interesting in our eyes as that of an electric lamp which suffers with spasmodic flinches and cries to us the most heartwrenching expressions of colour."

Manifesto of the Futurist Painters - Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini - 1910

quoted by Eric Michaud

Bill Brandt - The Queen Elizabeth - 1946

Piet Mondrian - Broadway Boogie-Woogie - 1942

Renato Guttuso - Boogie Woogie - 1953

Above or Below

“Women are kept from moral agency not by biology, but by a male social system that puts women above or below simple human choice”
Andrea Dworkin - Right-Wing Women - 1983

Gustav Klimt - Beethoven Frieze, detail (Paradise Chorus) -1902

J.M. Lauweriks - L'Odorat - ? (c.a. 1900?)

Koloman Moser - Poster for the 13th Vienna Secession Exhibition - 1902

Piet Mondrian - Evolution Tryptich - 1911

Docility

"To me, me personally, here is what meant working in a factory. It meant that all the external reasons (I had believed them internal before) upon which relied the feeling of my own dignity, my self-respect where in two or three weeks radically crushed under the pressure of a brutal and quotidian constraint. And do not believe it raised in me any revolt. No, but on the contrary what I expected least from myself - docility." 

Simone Weil, Lettres à Albertine Thèvenon, 1934-35

Jos Leonard - Man in de Stad - 1912

Piet Mondrian - Le Grand Nu - 1912

Roger de La Fresnaye - Le Jardin, Etude - 1929

A World of Artifices

"You will find yourself once again, where all is factitious and mechanical, reduction and construction: another world inside the world; a world fabricated, rigged, engineered, a world of artifices, of distortion, of adaptation, of fiction, of vanity, a world that has sense or value only for man, who is its architect."

Luigi Pirandello, One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, 1926

Piet Mondrian - Composition no.10 in black and white (pier and ocean) - 1915

Theo Van Doesburg - Landscape Study for Composition XII - 1918

Mies van der Rohe - Brick Country House - 1914