#sm

Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them would might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them. ↗

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

#criticism #goya #life #art

What is vital and healthy does not necessarily survive... An art, a whole civilization, may at any time slip through men's fingers in a very few years and be gone beyond recovery. If we are alive when such a thing is happening we shall hardly notice it until too late; and it is most unlikely that we shall know its causes. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#art

You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at the top of some steps in the courtyard where Linter's place was, and I looked across it and there was a little notice on the wall saying it was forbidden to take photographs of the courtyard without the man's permission. [..] They want to own the light! ↗

— Iain Banks

#human-nature #observation #science-fiction #art

[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'" (One On 1, interview with Budd Mishkin; NY1, March 25, 2007.) ↗

— David Halberstam

#basketball #david-halberstam #julius-erving #professionalism #sports

You cant beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you dont even try to. ↗

— William Faulkner

#women #trouble

A smile is the best way to get away with trouble even if it’s a fake one. ↗

— Masashi Kishimoto

#naruto #smile #trouble

I am a Woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal Woman, that's me. ↗

— Maya Angelou

#woman

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#arabs #israel #palestine #zionism #zionist

We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra... ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#crime

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair. ↗

— H.L. Mencken

#patriotism #crime