The best time
Clearly, the best time to be alive is when you start out wondering and end up knowing. There is only one generation in the whole history of mankind in that position. Us.
· Carl Sagan, 1974
Entries Tagged as 'Axiom'
The Stones of Venice II
All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.
· John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice II, (1853)
Spirits
I’m not sure that I believe in good spirits, but I have the uncanny feeling that there might be evil spirits.
· Peter H. Rossi
Poetry
Poetry should seem to the hearer to have been always present to his thought, but never before heard.
· Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Jane Morris
You are the noblest and dearest thing that the world has had to show me; and if no lesser loss than the loss of you could have brought me so much bitterness, I would still rather have had this to endure than have missed the fullness of wonder and worship which nothing else could have made known to me.
· Dante Gabriel Rossetti, letter to Jane Morris, 1870
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken–
The ice was all between.The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!· Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Bouguereau and the Real 19th Century
It has been called exciting and ‘avant-garde’, but the sad truth is that it is incredibly humdrum and monotonous. Whether you glue together pieces of plastic or shards of glass, assemble metal scraps or piles of feathers; whether you dribble little dollops of colors or drag fat uneven slashes of black; whether you compile a mountain of paper or wrap the statue of liberty. The effect is always the same: meaningless primitivism.
· Fred Ross, Bouguereau and the Real 19th Century
Pictures and Picture-Criticism
Mr. Ruskin’s truth is the truth which the spirit and tendency of these times called for; and the force and felicity of style and variety of knowledge with which it has been urged by the Oxford graduate entitle him fairly to be called the Luther of painting. He is the asserter of that individualism which is in art what private judgment is in theology; and he has risen up against the popes and doctors of painting, as the Wittenberg monk rose up against the popes and doctors of the Church. He has already received the honours of persecution; and if some ancient academicians and connoisseurs had the aid of the secular arm to put down art-heresy, we might see the bulky volumes of Modern Painters blazing in Trafalgar Square, with Mr Ruskin perhaps beside the pile, in a san-benito of Pre-Raphaelite canvases, waiting his turn to feed the faggots.
· George Richmond, ‘Pictures and Picture-Criticism’, National Review, July 1856 (p.93)
The Vampire Lestat
“What I don’t understand about you is this,” she said. “You hold to your old belief in goodness with a tenacity that is virtually unshakable. Yet you are so good at being what you are! You hunt your victims like a dark angel. You kill ruthlessly. You feast all the night long on victims when you choose.” “So?” I looked at her coldly. “I don’t know how to be bad at being bad.” She laughed. “I was a good marksman when I was a young man,” I said, “a good actor on the stage. And now I am a good vampire. So much for our understanding of the word ‘good.’”
· Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
Perfection – English Proverb
No barber shaves so close but another finds his work.
· English Proverb
