To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. Th...e word "nude," on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed. In fact, the word was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the early eighteenth century to persuade artless islanders that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practiced and valued as they should be, the naked human body was the central subject of art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What I mean by the Muse is that unimpeded clearness of the intuitive powers, which a perfectly truthful adherence to every admonit...ion of the higher instincts would bring to a finely organized human being.... Should these faculties have free play, I believe they will open new, deeper and purer sources of joyous inspiration than have yet refreshed the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Re-born, he was in the other life, the greater day of the human consciousness. And he was lone and apart from the little day, and ...out of contact with the daily people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be against war is not enough, it is hardly a beginning. And all things strive; we who try to speak know the ideas trying to be ...more human, we know things near their birth that try to become real. The truth here goes farther, there is another way of being against war and for poetry. We are against war and the sources of war. We are for poetry and the sources of poetry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are... the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the "easy life of the gods" would be a lifeless life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipo...litical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The discussion of the whole problem of technology ... has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upo...n the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful.... But ... homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and equipment in order to erect a world, not ... to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... we have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and pr...oviding for their bundance. Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of "making a living;" such is the verdict of society, and the number of people, especially in the professions who might challenge it, has decreased rapidly. The only exception society is willing to grant is to the artist, who, strictly speaking, is the only "worker" left in a laboring society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and provid...ing for their abundance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »