Quotes by Philosophers - Page 272

Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living
John Cage
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
Alfred North Whitehead
It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.
Aldous Huxley
Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils
Francis Bacon
You love your work. God help you, you love it! And thats the curse. That's the brand on your forehead for all of them to see. You love it and they know it, and they know they have you. Do you ever look at the people in the street? Aren't you afraid of them? I am. They move past you and they wear hats and they carry bundles. But that's not the substance of them. The substance of them is hatred for any man who loves his work. That's the only kind they fear. I don't know why
Ayn Rand
Art is anything you can get away with.
Marshall McLuhan
He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.
G.K. Chesterton
That is an artist as I love artists, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art - panem et Circen.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All great art is a form of complaint
John Cage
Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.
Herbert Marcuse
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
Marshall McLuhan
The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us.
Vilém Flusser
I'm often painted as the bad guy, and the artistic part of me wants to hand out the brush.
Criss Jami
The only interesting ideas are heresies
Susan Sontag
But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography --and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns-- is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger.
Susan Sontag
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
Aldous Huxley
Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.
Aristotle
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
Iris Murdoch
If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad.
Friedrich Schiller
In the traditional Islamic world, the hierarchy of the arts was not based on whether they were "fine" or "industrial" or "minor". It was based upon the effect of art on the soul of the human being.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Albert Camus
It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
Alain de Botton
Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that is hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.
Ayn Rand
The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
Albert Camus
Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
Albert Camus
It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
Alain de Botton
[…] Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are, sometimes, less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness.
Albert Camus
Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.
Erich Fromm
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.
Ayn Rand
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Everyone has their own ways of expression. I believe we all have a lot to say, but finding ways to say it is more than half the battle.
Criss Jami
Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
Allen Ginsberg
It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology
Noam Chomsky
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . .
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you know the why, you can live any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.
Confucius
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
G.K. Chesterton
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Susan Sontag
The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.
Mikhail Bakunin
You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things.
Will Durant
No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.
Will Durant
Your friend Plato holds that commonwealths will only be happy when either philosophers rule or rulers philosophize: how remote happiness must appear when philosophers won't even deign to share their thoughts with kings.
Thomas More
You need to have the means to impose yourself
Bangambiki Habyarimana
In leadership, the way up is down. Serve before you get served
Bangambiki Habyarimana
When the qualities that now confer leadership have become universal, there will no longer be leaders and followers, and democracy will have been realized at last.
Bertrand Russell
You have to be a light to yourself in a world that is utterly becoming dark.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
He listened to their opinions, stated his own, and supported them with reasons; and from his being constantly occupied with such meditations, it resulted, that when in command no complication could ever present itself with which he was not prepared to deal.
Niccolò Machiavelli
... From want of foresight men make changes which relishing well at first do not betray their hidden venom, as I have already observed respecting hectic fever. Nevertheless, the ruler is not truly wise who cannot discern evils before they develop themselves, and this is a faculty given to few.
Niccolò Machiavelli
... Whoever becomes master of a city accustomed to live in freedom and does no destroy it, may reckon on being destroyed by it. For if it should rebel, it can always screen itself under the name of liberty and its ancient laws, which no length of time, nor any benefit conferred will ever cause it to forget; and do what you will, and take what care you may, unless the inhabitants be scattered and dispersed, this name, and the old order of things, will never cease to be remembered...
Niccolò Machiavelli
... If instead of colonies you send troops, the cost is vastly greater, and the whole revenues of the country are spent in guarding it so that the gain becomes a loss, and much deeper offense is given since in shifting the quarters of your soldiers from place to place the whole country suffers hardship, which as all feel, all are made enemies and enemies who remaining, although vanquished, in their own homes, have power to hurt. In every way, therefore, this mode of defense is as disadvantageous as that by colonizing is useful.
Niccolò Machiavelli
... I believe that he will prosper most whose mode of acting best adapts itself to the character of the times; and conversely that he will be unprosperous, with whose mode of acting the times do not accord.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The surest way to damage society is to call for a "great man" to lead it. The surest way to improve society is to become a great man to lead oneself and convince others to do likewise.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
To lead people, you must follow behind.
Lao Tzu
The main tenet of design thinking is empathy for the people you're trying to design for. Leadership is exactly the same thing - building empathy for the people that you're entrusted to help.
David Kelley