The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process--a process based not on synthesis but on selection. T...he difference was a basic one. Paintings were made--constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes--but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could fore...tell achievement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most works of literature have a beginning, middle, and an end. Most works of pornography do not. A typical piece of pornographic f...iction will usually have some kind of crude excuse for a beginning, but having once begun, it goes on and on and ends nowhere. This impulse or compulsion to repeat, to repeat endlessly, is one of pornography's most striking qualities. A pornographic work of fiction characteristically develops by unremitting repetition and minute mechanical variation--the words that may describe the process are again, again, again, and more, more, more. We also observed that although pornography is obsessed with the idea of pleasure, of infinite pleasure, the idea of gratification, of an end to pleasure (pleasure being here an endless experience of retentiveness, without release) cannot develop. If form in art consists in the arousal in the reader of certain expectations and the fulfillment of those expectations, then in this context too pornography is resistant to form and opposed to art. For fulfillment implies completion, gratification, an end; and it is as an end, a conclusion of any kind, that pornography most resists. The ideal pornographic novel, I should repeat, would go on forever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To meditate on a koan is to engage in an active process, like that we engage in when we try to solve a mathematical problem. As in... mathematics, the solution is supposed to come suddenly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A process in the weather of the world Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child... Sits in their double shade. A process blows the moon into the sun, Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin; And the heart gives up its dead.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science is not gadgetry. The desirable adjuncts of modern living, although in many instances made possible by science, certainly d...o not constitute science. Basic scientific knowledge often (but not always) is a prerequisite to such developments, but technology primarily deserves the credit for having the financial courage, the ingenuity, and the driving energy to see to it that so-called "pure knowledge" is in fact brought to the practical service of man. And it should also be recognized that those who have the urge to apply knowledge usefully have themselves often made significant contribution to pure knowledge and have even more often served as a stimulation to the activities of a pure researcher.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The process of education in the oldest profession in the world is like any other educational process, in that it requires time and... effort and patience; it can only be acquired by taking one step at a time, though the steps become accelerated after the first few.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Henry B. Adams was the first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether truth was,... or was not, true. He did not even care that it should be proved true, unless the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for fun.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good performance, like a human life, is a temporal affair--a process in time. It is good as a whole through being good in its pa...rts, and through their good order to one another. It cannot be called good as a whole until it is finished. During the process all we can say of it, if we speak precisely, is that it is becoming good. The same is true of a whole human life. Just as the whole performance never exists at any one time, but is a process of becoming, so a human life is also a performance in time and a process of becoming. And just as the goodness that attaches to the performance as a whole does not attach to any of its parts, so the goodness of a human life as a whole belongs to it alone, and not to any of its parts or phases.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »