“Revolution is not ‘showing’ life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation.”
— Guy Debord, from Society of the Spectacle (via theonlymagicleftisart)
“CF Gill: In letter number one you use the expression “Your slim gilt soul,” and you refer to Lord Alfred’s “red rose-leaf lips.” The second letter contains the words, “You are the divine thing I want,” and describes Lord Alfred’s letter as being “delightful, red and yellow wine to me.” Do you think that an ordinarily constituted being would address such expressions to a younger man?
Wilde: I am not, happily I think, an ordinarily constituted being.”
— Transcript from Oscar Wilde’s trial. CF Gill cross-examined Wilde for the prosecution. (via vyvyan-holland)
“If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller’s felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, “Everything Is Illuminated” (via petrichour)
(Source: bookmania)
Evelyn Waugh, “Brideshead Revisited”
“Great poetry does not teach us anything – it changes us. Man is like a musical instrument of many strings, of which only a few are sounded by the narrow interests of his daily life; and the others, for want of use, are continually becoming tuneless and forgotten. Heroic poetry is a phantom finger swept over all the strings, arousing from man’s whole nature a song of answering harmony. It is the poetry of action, for such alone can arouse the whole nature of man. It touches all the strings – those of wonder and pity, of fear and joy. It ignores morals, for its business is not in any way to make us rules for life, but to make character. It is not, as a great English writer has said, ‘a criticism of life’, but rather a fire in the spirit, burning away what is mean and deepening what is shallow.”
— W. B. Yeats, from “Irish Poets and Irish Poetry” in The Irish Fireside, October 9, 1886 (via litverve)
“In “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), the Romantic poet John Keats wrote the famous lines: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Yet in today’s environment, one standard of beauty is no more the truth than is one standard of ugliness. It is possible that the most convention-busting graphic design by students and alumni of Cranbrook, CalArts and Rhode Island School of Design, among other hothouses where theoretical constructs are used to justify what the untutored eye might deem ugly, could become the foundation for new standards based on contemporary sensibilities. Certainly, these approaches have attracted many followers throughout the design world.
“Where does beauty begin and where does it end?” wrote John Cage in Silence (1961). “Where it ends is where the artist begins.” So in order to stretch the perimeters of art and design to any serious extent it becomes necessary to suspend popular notions of beauty so that alternative aesthetic standards can be explored.
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— Eye Magazine | Feature | Cult of the ugly http://bit.ly/15MuHKD
“Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 - 1962)
“To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.”
— Auguste Rodin (via thingsandschemes)
