#human

Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#nature

To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is. ↗

— David McCullough

#civic-responsibility #history #humanity #life #mankind

You can’t enjoy art or books in a hurry. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#arts #arts-and-humanities #book #books #culture

A dog has one aim in life... to bestow his heart. ↗

— J.R. Ackerley

#dog #doglovers #humanity #kindness #love

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#art #art forms #being #forms #greatest

Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives. ↗

— Aberjhani

#cultural-arts #famous-poets #humanity #jazz #jazz-appreciation-month

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#human-condition #art

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good. It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good…Art can only give food – a jolt – the occasion – for psychical experience. ↗

— Andrei Tarkovsky

#humanity #art

What is the world? What is it for? It is an art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite. Assess it like prose, like poetry, like architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, delta blues, opera, tragedy, comedy, romance, epic. Assess it like you would a Faberge egg, like a gunfight, like a musical, like a snowflake, like a death, a birth, a triumph, a love story, a tornado, a smile, a heartbreak, a sweater, a hunger pain, a desire, a fufillment, a desert, a waterfall, a song, a race, a frog, a play, a song, a marriage, a consummation, a thirst quenched. Assess it like that. And when you're done, find an ant and have him assess the cathedrals of Europe. ↗

— N.D. Wilson

#god #human #life #religion #architecture

Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#post-modernism #life