• Countries

  Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

  4.4 · 5 votes · 78 reads

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• Defects

  Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

  4.1 · 40 votes · 190 reads

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• Art and Culture

  Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

  4.0 · 56 votes · 190 reads

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• Nature

  Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

  3.1 · 62 votes · 19 reads

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• Society

  Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

  3.8 · 64 votes · 161 reads

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• Defects

  Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

  5.0 · 58 votes · 115 reads

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• Defects

  Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

  3.6 · 22 votes · 32 reads

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• Various

  Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

  4.6 · 12 votes · 164 reads

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• Nature

  For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

  3.1 · 47 votes · 13 reads

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• Society

  Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people.

  5.0 · 64 votes · 121 reads

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• Thought and Reason

  I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

  3.8 · 56 votes · 60 reads

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• Art and Culture

  In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.

  4.6 · 20 votes · 158 reads

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• Art and Culture

  In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Inte

  4.3 · 18 votes · 122 reads

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• Various

  In the final analysis, ''style'' is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

  4.4 · 32 votes · 123 reads

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• Virtues

  Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

  3.5 · 39 votes · 64 reads

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• Art and Culture

  Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''

  4.5 · 20 votes · 74 reads

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• Feelings

  It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.

  3.1 · 42 votes · 120 reads

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• Thought and Reason

  It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe -though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.

  4.6 · 50 votes · 164 reads

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• Defects

  Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.

  3.5 · 44 votes · 153 reads

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• Art and Culture

  Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

  5.0 · 7 votes · 12 reads

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• Society

  Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.

  3.1 · 29 votes · 200 reads

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• Various

  Taste has no system and no proofs.

  3.3 · 32 votes · 26 reads

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• Art and Culture

  The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to sh

  4.9 · 53 votes · 85 reads

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• Various

  The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

  4.4 · 49 votes · 157 reads

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• Art and Culture

  The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

  4.1 · 22 votes · 77 reads

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• Various

  The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventua

  5.0 · 14 votes · 25 reads

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• Various

  The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context,

  4.7 · 63 votes · 107 reads

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• Government and Politics

  The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

  3.8 · 9 votes · 7 reads

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• Society

  The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

  3.5 · 8 votes · 144 reads

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• Time

  The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects -making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

  3.1 · 16 votes · 58 reads

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• Thought and Reason

  The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

  4.2 · 12 votes · 33 reads

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• Defects

  The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.

  3.1 · 17 votes · 149 reads

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• Thought and Reason

  The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

  4.6 · 38 votes · 114 reads

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• Art and Culture

  The Writeris either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

  3.6 · 61 votes · 65 reads

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• Thought and Reason

  Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism - victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The cour

  3.5 · 27 votes · 143 reads

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• Various

  Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

  3.4 · 25 votes · 140 reads

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• Art and Culture

  Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.

  4.9 · 20 votes · 32 reads

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• Government and Politics

  War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view ''realistically;'' that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent - war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrif

  3.5 · 61 votes · 28 reads

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• Virtues

  What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

  4.6 · 48 votes · 51 reads

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• Nature

  With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease - because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blig

  4.3 · 48 votes · 46 reads

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Page 1 of 2 · 45 quotes

What they wrote about

• Disease4 of their quotes
• Critics3 of their quotes
• Taste3 of their quotes
• Death2 of their quotes
• Literature2 of their quotes
• Writers2 of their quotes