Art is inextricably tied to man's survival - not to his physical survival, but to that on which his physical survival depends: to the preservation and survival of his consciousness.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.All art is quite useless.
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We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.All art is quite useless.
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Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each one of us a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.
I like "Julie Gold's song "From a Distance". Her song reminds me of the world as seen through an observer's eye. Seen from a distance, we are people in the same band playing music for everyone. We are artists who play the most beautiful instruments in the world - life.
I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream - I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal - to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals.
[T]he scale of a man's evil is not entirely to be measured by its practical consequences. Men commit evil within the scope available to them.
In some mystical way, Lenny seemed to ennoble work more than anyone I had ever met"Also in "Stories and Scripts:an Anthology