This is the shape of the tree, And the flower and the leaf, and the three pale beautiful pilgrims:... This is what you are to me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you have ever watched an artist constructing with bits of cold stone a beautiful living picture you know that he works faithful...ly and carefully on the pattern from the wrong side and while he is working every inequality, every tint a little too dull is apparent to him as his picture grows, but he works on and on. And even when he finishes at last and looks down at the completed pattern he is not discouraged to see here a little crevice and there a little roughness, an open seam here, a tiny patch there where the bit of marble was too small. Now he pours his cement over it and smoothes [sic] it into every seam, and with faith puts his work to dry. Next day the pattern is turned and the perfect whole is given to view, needing only the polishing of a loving hand to make it ready to slip in place. So we should work faithfully on our pattern, cement it together with ourselves, and polish it with human kindness; and lo! the work slips into place seemingly a perfect whole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced ...to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it thr...eatens a man truly blinded by his hunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-class condition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincide under the gaze (and the blows) of the police.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Drawing is a struggle between nature and the artist, in which the better the artist understands the intentions of nature, the more... easily he will triumph over it. For him it is not a question of copying, but of interpreting in a simpler and more luminous language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismis...s names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity--their links with their dead and the unborn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The inevitableness, the idealism, and the blessing of war, as an indispensable and stimulating law of development, must be repeate...dly emphasized.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Blake and Goethe were individualists par excellence, uncompromisingly protective of their single vision. In both Faust Part II and... The Four Zoas, emphasis on the universality of the poet's message contrasts with the resistant texture of a compressed style and the striking complexity of the mythological machinery. Blake likes to emphasize that he is not writing for the simple-minded; Goethe takes a teasing pleasure in keeping philologists busy. Faust and The Four Zoas are dramatic epics of Humanity, but embodied in a mythic language whose uniqueness and quirkiness are jealously guarded. Blake never published The Four Zoas, though it culminates his early prophecies and provides the indispensable key to the later ones. And Goethe refused to allow Faust Part II to be printed in its entirety until after his death. Both poets postponed the public's discovery of their central works; secrecy was enforced as long as it could be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, .../>Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard; Enough that he heard it once; we shall hear it by and by.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »