The procedure of the novel is to individualize. As with other art forms, what it has to say that is of collective value is said by... inference from individual concrete things. History, on the other hand, proceeds by generalization. It treats people as groups; and when individuals appear they appear as catalysts of large collective actions or as representatives of groups, their significance being that of the group forces, the collection, the sum. This is a difference of convention, and on the conventions of an art depends its special expressiveness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control o...ver what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is t...o things made by his art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art--that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, express...ed by every means available to the arts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to th...e natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I speak for an art ... weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the sam...e old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »