"The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either."
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Art
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"The only real distinction at this dangerous moment in human history and cosmic development has nothing to do with medals and ribbons. Not to fall asleep is distinguished. Everything else is mere popcorn."
"One of the things that's good for me is that I can go from one art form to another."
"I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual."
"A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample."
"If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that."
"Happy season of childhood! Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man's hut With auroral radiance; and for thy nursling hast provided a soft swathing of love and infinite hope wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced round by sweetest dreams!"
"To know, to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic art, of which the best logic's can but babble on the surface."
"No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself."
"Goethe's devil is a cultivated personage and acquainted with the modern sciences; sneers at witchcraft and the black art even while employing them, and doubts most things, nay, half disbelieves even his own existence."
"He who first shortened the labor of Copyists by device of Movable Types was disbanding hired armies and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic world: he had invented the Art of printing."
"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts."
"In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them."
"In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance."
"It is a cruel thought, that, when we feel ourselves standing on the firmest ground in every respect, the cursed arts of our secret enemies, combining with other causes, should effect, by depreciating our money, what the open arms of a powerful enemy could not."
"The art of life is the art of avoiding pain; and he is the best pilot, who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset."
"In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.... Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free inquiry must be indulged.... Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them."
"Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art ."
"The contradictory experiments of chemists leave us at liberty to conclude what we please. My conclusion is, that art has not yet invented sufficient aids to enable such subtle bodies [air, light, &c.] to make a well-defined impression on organs as blunt as ours; that it is laudable to encourage investigation but to hold back conclusion."
"Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God."