#z

Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#civilization #culture #europe #history #renaissance

I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be perfect. The mistake of planners and architects is to believe that fifty years from now Alexanderplatz will be perfected. -p.197 ↗

— Daniel Libeskind

#architecture #methodology #modernity #urban-planning #architecture

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print. [Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Nov. 1980), pp. 16-32] ↗

— Barbara W. Tuchman

#civilization #humanity #literature #mind #thought

Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies. ↗

— Joseph Campbell

#believers #metaphor #myth #organized-religion #religion

All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art. ↗

— Roman Payne

#artists #awkwardness #bizarre #clumsiness #good-art

Have nuts and be nuts. ↗

— Criss Jami

#courage #crazy #dreams #funny #humor

You gotta know when to be lazy. Done correctly, it's am art form that benefits everyone. ↗

— Nicholas Sparks

#lazy #art

The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#art

Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#anderbo-com #art #beauty #behavior #books

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