Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
~ Scott Adams
A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
~ Theodore Adorno
It is curious that money, which is the most valuable thing in life, excepis excipiendis, should be the most fatal corrupter of music, literature, painting and all the arts. As soon as any art is pursued with a view of money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work.
~ Samuel Butler
Nature is the Art of God.
~ Dante Alighieri in Monarchy
Art is a quest for the useless.
~ Gustave Flaubert
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
~ Rollo May
Art is not pleasure, or an amusement; art is a great matter.
~ Leo Tolstoy, in What Is Art?
__________
In The Miracle of Language
Tacitast melior mulier semper quam loquens. [A woman is always worth more seen than heard.]
~ in Rudens -1114
Quem di diligunt adulescens moritur, dum valet sentit sapit. [He whom the gods love dies young, while he has strength and senses and wits.
~ in Bacchides, -816
The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant’s shoulder to mount on.
~ in The Friend
Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises. The truth depends on, and is only arrived at, by a legitimate deduction from all the facts which are truly material.
The man’s desire is for the woman; but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
I believe Plato and Socrates. I believe in Jesus Christ.
He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all.
~ in Moral and Religious Aphorisms
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks
All the sweet serenity of books.
A torn jacket is soon mended, but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
He that respects himself is safe from others; he wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.
Academic training in beauty is a sham.
It takes a very long time to become young.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
