#it

The most important thing in life is knowing the most important things in life. ↗

— David F. Jakielo

#priorities #life

Thou art a man God is no more Thy own humanity Learn to adore ↗

— William Blake

#spiritual #art

Doubt not your purpose nor your strength. ↗

— Joe Dever

#attitude

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify--capriciously--their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships--and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes--husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer... ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#history #literature #art

What is certain is this, that I never rested in that way again, my feet obscenely resting on the earth, my arms on the handlebars and on my arms my head, rocking and abandoned. It is indeed a delporable sight, a deplorable example, for the people, who so need to be encouraged, in their bitter toil, and to have before their eyes manifestations of strength only, of courage and joy, without which they might collapse, at the end of the day, and roll on the ground. ↗

— Samuel Beckett

#example #identifying-with-others #people #separation #courage

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#artists #writers #writing #art

Science is an organized pursuit of triviality. Art is a casual pursuit of significance. Let's keep it in perspective. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#perspective #pursuit #science #significance #trivia

Art’s only concern with the real is to abolish it, and to substitute for it a new reality ↗

— Jean Rousset

#creativity #reality #art

I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#writing #art

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu. ↗

— W.H. Auden

#conventionality #taste #art