Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Cinema is like dream.
Music is our myth of the inner life.
Pioneering is the work of individuals.
Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.
One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.
Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.
Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.
Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?
Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.
Art is just as comprehensible as science, but in its own terms.
The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.
Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.
Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.
Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.
If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.
The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.
common sense is a very tricky instrument; it is as deceptive as it is indispensable.
The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.
What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding.
value exists only where there is consciousness. Where nothing ever is felt, nothing matters.
Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.
The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.
A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.
As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.
Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive.
The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.
Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.
The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it-right or wrong-may be given.
Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.
The fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.
Ritual is the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit, as it were, of people's imaginative insight into life.
All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.
The high intellectual value of images, however, lies in the fact that they usually, and perhaps always, fit more than one actual experience.
Only a creature that can think symbolically about life can conceive of its own death. Our knowledge of death is part of our knowledge of life.
We have no physical model of this endless rhythm of individuation and involvement, we do have its image in the world of art, most purely in dance.
Feeling, in the broad sense of whatever is felt in any way, as sensory stimulus or inward tension, pain, emotion or intent, is the mark of mentality.
The development of beings with minds is probably the highest individuation the world has ever known, and its prehistory is the history of life on earth.
The intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.
A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents.
If a work of art is a projection of feeling, its kinship with organic nature will emerge, no matter through how many transformations, logically and inevitably.
A mind that is very selective to forms... is apt to use its images metaphorically, to exploit their possible significance for the conception of remote or intangible ideas.
Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form before the light fell on them.
the wide discrepancy between reason and feeling may be unreal; it is not improbable that intellect is a high form of feeling - a specialized, intensive feeling about intuitions.
The secret of 'fusion' is the fact that the artist's eye sees in nature... an inexhaustible wealth of tension, rhythms, continuities, and contrasts which can be rendered in line and color.
The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.
It is significant that people who refuse to tell their children fairytales do not fear that the children will believe in princes and princesses, but that they will believe in witches and bogeys.
Religion, even the most primitive and superstitious, is inevitably a beginning of culture. It is not possible without some kind of symbolic expression ... and begets dramatic gesture, dance, and chant.
To trace the development of mind from earliest times ... requires ... not a categorical concept, but a functional one.... The most promising operational principle for this purpose is the principle of individuation.
Artistic form is congruent with the dynamic forms of our direct sensuous, mental, and emotional life; works of art are projections of "felt life", as Henry James called it, into spatial, temporal, and poetic structures.
The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling.