"If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?"

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“Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.”

“So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!”

“The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.”

“However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like — not even a particular kind of writing.”

“We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art...what we are talking about — and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth — I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.”

“The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself distinction, and what was talent but the art of being completely whatever it was that one happened to be?”

Resonant Thoughts

"Neither total rejection nor complete recognition of the state is useful for the democratic efforts of civil society. The overcoming of the state, particularly the nation-state, is a long-term process."

— Abdullah Öcalan

Literature1949

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"In the West, we have easier ways now to make a killing than killing. If Sir Francis Drake, the great admiral-pirate of Elizabethan England, were a young man today, would he emigrate to Somalia to get …"

— Steve Sailer

Journalism1958

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"For action to be rational, the beliefs on which it is based must themselves be well founded. In turn, this requirement is divided into two parts. On the one hand, the beliefs must be unbiased with res…"

— Jon Elster

Science1940

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"We made music seated on the grass of Brasilia's super-squares, at home, at college. It was a creative time, more ingenuous, when the people amused more themselves, played more."

— Kátya Chamma

Music1961

#art