Quotes by Philosophers - Page 271

Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.
Francis Bacon
Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.
Aldous Huxley
I have read so many books. And yet, like most Autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of no where, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading. And then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates and no matter how often I reread the same lines they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she's been reading the menu.
Muriel Barbery
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.
Umberto Eco
The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Readers may be divided into four classes: I. Sponges, who absorb all they read, and return it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied. II. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing, and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. III. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. IV. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.(Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)
Arthur Schopenhauer
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
Mortimer J. Adler
Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
Edmund Burke
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau
Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.
Voltaire
No apprenticeship has ever been thought necessary to qualify for husbandry, the great trade of the country. After what are called the fine arts, and the liberal professions, however, there is perhaps no trade which requires so great a variety of knowledge and experience.
Adam Smith
The extent of creativity to which I admire in an individual is his ability to be richly creative while still, in a way, telling the truth. It is the fool who creates only his own lies, and the bore who simply repeats what he is told.
Criss Jami
In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.
Theodor W. Adorno
In the heart of appeasement there's the fear of rejection, and in acts of fear there are mirrors of oppression.
Criss Jami
An artist reveals his naked soul in his work - and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it.
Ayn Rand
It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building.
John Ruskin
I’ve done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I’ve been swindled all the same because it’s never anything more.
Simone de Beauvoir
An artist is someone who, needing nothing and no one, wants everything and everyone.
Neel Burton
Art as the single superior counter-force against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, anti-Nihilist par excellence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
[N]othing is more easily corrupted than an artist.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Some artists benefit less from being interviewed than they do from being left alone.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
He knew Kandinsky by heart: every trickle of red, slash of black ink, and hemorrhage of gold. Each dissonant note in its allegro, the harmony in its adagio, and its deep blue intermezzo, formed a symphony he had memorized in his body. He couldn’t say if Fragment 2 symbolized the Deluge, the Last Judgment, or the Resurrection. But it had become his religion, offering both redemption and pain..
Kelly Oliver
It is by continuing to put out good work that the artist best shows his gratitude.
Criss Jami
Jiu Jitsu uses us to express itself, and the best thing we can do to is to become a vehicle capable of expressing Jiu Jitsu with all of its perfection minus our imperfections.
Chris Matakas
that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word...
Jean Baudrillard
However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.
Iris Murdoch
Long before being artists, we are artisans; and all fabrication, however rudimentary, lives on likeness and repetition, like the natural geometry which serves as its fulcrum. Fabrication works on models which it sets out to reproduce; and even when it invents, it proceeds, or imagines itself to proceed, by a new arrangement of elements already known. Its principle is that “we must have like to produce like.” In short, the strict application of the principle of finality, like that of the principle of mechanical causality, leads to the conclusion that “all is given.” Both principles say the same thing in their respective languages, because they respond to the same need.
Henri Bergson
An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.
G.K. Chesterton
True mastery transcends any particular art. It stems from mastery of oneself--the ability, developed through self-discipline, to be calm, fully aware, and completely in tune with oneself and the surroundings. Then, and only then, can a person know himself.
Bruce Lee
The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,' knew Schopenhauer.
Alain de Botton
What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image. Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognise as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own. They explain our condition to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it.
Alain de Botton
Art is not religion, 'it doesn't even lead to religion.' But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides behind the error.
Maurice Blanchot
In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Modern man has lost the sense of wonderabout the unknown and he treats it asan enemy.
Laurens van der Post
Perhaps never before in history has the artist been so certain that the more daring, iconoclastic, absurd, and inaccessible he is, the more he will be recognized, praised, spoiled, idolatrized. In some countries the result has even been an academicism in reverse, the academicism of the “avant-garde” - to such a point that any artistic experience that makes no concessions to this new conformism is in danger of being stifled or ignored.
Mircea Eliade
It follows from Schopenhauer’s analysis that evert genuine work of art must have its origin in direct perception; that is to say it does not originate in concepts, and concepts are not what it communicates. This is what more than anything else differentiates good art from bad, or more accurately authentic from inauthentic art. The latter often originates in a desire on the part of the artist to meet some demand external to himself – to win approval, say, or be in the fashion, or supply a market – or else to put over a message of some sort. Such an artist starts by trying to thin what it would be a good idea to do – in other words, the starting point of the process for him is something that exists in terms of concepts. The inevitable result is dead art, of whatever kind, whether imitative, academic, commercial, didactic or fashion-conscious. It may be successful in its day because it meets the demands of its day, but once that day is over it has no inner life of its own with which to outlive it.
Bryan Magee
Artists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them.
Iris Murdoch
The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there.
Walter Benjamin
I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.
Iris Murdoch
We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.
G.K. Chesterton
In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed. . . . The aesthetic component of those instruments enhanced their function but was never central, never an independent, nonutilitarian thing.
Stanisław Lem
To talk of a modern work of art enduring is sillier than talking of the eternal values of Standard Oil.
Raoul Vaneigem
Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.
Paul Valéry
A composition—and every work of art is one—is created in a wondrous interplay between imagination and reason, or between mind and reflection. For there will always be an element of chance in the creative process.
Jostein Gaarder
In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself? … No ordinary object insists on being taken for an ordinary thing, but a work that does so betrays itself by this very effort. The function of art in such a case is to reproduce the difference of art. But the mere fact that art seeks to cancel this difference and fails in its effort to do so perhaps says more about art than could any excuse or critique.
Niklas Luhmann
I'm a peasantI'm the muzhikA pest you're destined to play the musicAnd yes it's pleasant to say it's beauty I'mIndebted to rest respecting it truly
Criss Jami
The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence.
Jean Baudrillard
I'm never proud of my old work. I always feel as though my skills have since improved.
Criss Jami
Let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all.
Albert Camus
An artist that makes art merely to meet a demand is a slave to what his patrons wants to see, or, hear.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Bardak Electronics, the saftey handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands first on the rim and then in the centre of the ashtray.Which explains how the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present.
Alain de Botton
Talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.
Muriel Barbery
Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.
Alain de Botton
Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.
G.K. Chesterton
From recovery to rags and rags to recovery symbolizes art - a perfect compilation of human imperfections.
Criss Jami
Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.Well, it's all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what's going on.
Umberto Eco
It starts off like climbing a tree or solving a puzzle - poetry, if nothing else, is just fun to write. But deeper into each and every piece, you no longer hesitate to call it work. It's passion. A poet's sense of lyrical accomplishment is then his food and water, his means of survival.
Criss Jami
Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.
Vilém Flusser