Truisms

Jenny Holzer, is a well known artist who focuses on text, delivered via LED screens and projectors, as her medium. She is best known for her "Truisms", a series of text statements, from the late 1970's. The most famous of her "Truisms" is "Protect Me From What I Want" which was projected in New York Times Square in 1982. In her ironic view, culture becomes a continuous loop of creating and sating desires that we barely know we have—or want to admit to.

Here are my favorite Jenny Holzer "Truisms":

• Being happy is more important than anything else
• Calm is more conducive to creativity than is anxiety
• Emotional responses ar as valuable as intellectual responses
• Faithfulness is a social not a biological law
• Fear is the greatest incapacitator
• Go all out in romance and let the chips fall where they may
• It's better to be naive than jaded
• Just believing something can make it happen
• Pain can be a very positive thing
• Playing it safe can cause a lot of damage in the long run
• Repetition is the best way to learn
• The cruelest disappointment is when you let yourself down
• The sum of your actions determines what you are
• Unquestioning love demonstrates largeness of spirit
• When something terrible happens people wake up
• You must have one grand passion
• Your oldest fears are the worst ones

One of these days I will compile a collection of my own Truisms, but it is in its ground floor phase. Still.