Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Love works miracles in stillness.
Man is everywhere still in chains.
Art is pattern informed by sensibility.
I know of no better name than Anarchism.
Art is an indecent exposure of the consciousness.
The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.
The slave may be happy, but happiness is not enough.
Works of art must persist as objects of contemplation.
The sensitive artist knows that a bitter wind is blowing.
The modern artist, by nature and destiny, is always an individualist.
Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society.
I can imagine no society which does not embody some method of arbitration.
Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past.
The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish.
If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.
In general, modern art... has been inspired by a natural desire to chart the uncharted.
In the evolution of mankind there has always been a certain degree of social coherence.
A man of personality can formulate ideals, but only a man of character can achieve them.
Art in its widest sense is the extension of the personality: a host of artificial limbs.
The fundamental purpose of the artist is the same as that of a scientist: to state a fact.
What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.
Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.
Great changes in the destiny of mankind can be effected only in the minds of little children.
The characteristic political attitude of today is not one of positive belief, but of despair.
Perhaps it is this theory of all work and no play that has made the Marxist such a very dull boy.
I call religion a natural authority, but it has usually been conceived as a supernatural authority.
The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.
The sense of historical continuity, and a feeling for philosophical rectitude cannot, however, be compromised.
If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical.
I have not the slightest doubt that this form of individuation represents a higher stage in the evolution of mankind.
Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.
It was play rather than work which enabled man to evolve his higher faculties - everything we mean by the word 'culture'.
The work of art... is an instrument for tilling the human psyche, that it may continue to yield a harvest of vital beauty.
Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things.
These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity.
The principle of equity first came into evidence in Roman jurisprudence and was derived by analogy from the physical meaning of the word.
You might think that it would he the natural desire of every man to develop as an independent personality, but this does not seem to be true.
Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.
That is why I believe that art is so much more significant than either economics or philosophy. It is the direct measure of man's spiritual vision.
It is not my purpose as a poet to condemn war (or to be exact, modern warfare). I only wish to present the universal aspects of a particular event.
Spontaneity is not enough - or, to be more exact, spontaneity is not possible until there is an unconscious coordination of form, space and vision.
The only sin is ugliness, and if we believed this with all our being, all other activities of the human spirit could be left to take care of themselves.
It will be a gay world. There will be lights everywhere except in the minds of men, and the fall of the last civilization will not be heard above the din.
To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values - above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism.
My own early experiences in war led me to suspect the value of discipline, even in that sphere where it is so often regarded as the first essential for success.
The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech...For true poetry is never speech but always a song.
It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.
It is already clear, after twenty years of socialism in Russia, that if you do not provide your society with a new religion, it will gradually revert to the old one.
We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization.
The most general law in nature is equity-the principle of balance and symmetry which guides the growth of forms along the lines of the greatest structural efficiency.