beauty & art14 quotes

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic, as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”

“And we wouldn’t be able to study Japanese art, it seems to me, without becoming much happier and more cheerful, and it makes us return to nature, despite our education and our work in a world of convention.”

“The yearning for certainty which grails the scientist, the aching beauty which harasses the artist, the sweet thorn of justice which fierces the rebel from the eases of life, or the thrill of exultation with which we hear of true acts of that now difficult virtue of courage, of cheerful endurance of hopeless suffering are these really derivable from matter? Or even continuous with the idiot hierarchies of speechless apes?”

“‘I have led a toothless life’, he thought. ‘A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on—and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.’” – Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason, 1945.

I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

“My approach to art is multipartite, a psychomedical workup. First, palpation: I record the work’s emotional and sensory character, photographing it by faithful description. Second, genealogy: the work’s psychohistory, its relation to the artist and era. Third, X-ray: its skeleton or ritual deep structure. Fourth, analogy: its resemblance to other things, past and future, high and low.”

“Secularization is a welcome process if it allows us to analyze literature and art without moral preconception and sermonizing; but secularization is pernicious when it strips the spiritual dimension from experience.”

“Art is high-Quality endeavor. That is all that really needs to be said. Or, if something more high-sounding is demanded: Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man.”

“Poetry, drama, portraiture and music show us that mortality is inextricably woven into the human scheme of things: that our virtues and our loves are the virtues and loves of dying creatures; that everything that leads us to cherish one another, to sacrifice ourselves, to make sublime and heroic gestures, is predicated on the assumption that we are vulnerable and transient, with only a fleeting claim on the things of this world.”

“Without an economic wealth that is concentrated in a few hands, there can be no ‘wealth’ of art, of thought, or of elegance, not to speak of the luxury of possessing a worldview and of thinking theoretically instead of practically. Economic impoverishment at once brings spiritual and artistic impoverishment in its train.”

“Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.”

“There is no God, but we still have the mountains and the hummingbirds. Or a good drink and a good fuck. Even a good shit and a good jerk. Try as you might, you cannot escape small pleasures. The flowers please you in spite of yourself, as you walk down the street muttering. Despairing over no text message from some girl you’d get tired of if she texted you back. Worrying about work. The clouds look painterly at sunset every god damn day and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it. Even if you shut the blinds the magic hour light leaks through. A baby smiles at you in the checkout line. Sees something in your eyes. It was not lost.”

“The most revolutionary act is to actually make something.”

“Beauty has been stolen from the people and sold back to them under the concept of luxury.”

“If he would express the sight in colour the artist would use soft pastels for the plains to the west and south, harsh black-purple for the cliffs to the north and east. To express it in music the conductor would bring out the soul of the strings for the west and south, and force the brass to explode and the percussion to thunder for the north and east. To put it in words the poet would create a sigh for the west and south and a hostile fatalism for the north and east. To report on it technically the geologist would describe rolling, grass-covered savannas to the west and south, ending abruptly in two gigantic rock table-moun-tains to the north and east.”