I know not whether it would be too bold an assertion to say that candor makes capacity.... But in order to try the truth of any ob...servation relating to the mind, the easiest method is to illustrate it by outward objects. If, for instance, a man was to sweat and labor all the days of his life to fill a chest which was already full, the absurdity of his vain endeavor would be glaring. In the same manner, when the human mind is filled and stuffed with notions brought thither by fallacious inclinations, there is no room for truth to enter: candor being banished, passions alone bear the sway.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am damnably sick of Italy, Italian and Italians, outrageously, illogically sick.... I hate to think that Italians ever did anyth...ing in the way of art.... What did they do but illustrate a page or so of the New Testament! They themselves think they have a monopoly in the line. I am dead tired of their bello and bellezza.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-or...dinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-ordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized?... A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The method of painting is the natural growth out of a need. I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. Technique i...s just a means of arriving at a statement.... I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some years ago, writing about stage adaptations of fiction, I noted: "There is a simple law governing the dramatization of novels:... if it is worth doing, it can't be done; if it can be done, it's not worth doing." Certain reviewers did me the honor of calling this Simon's Law, and I might as well state it now as far as the screen is concerned, "Simon's Law" may still serve as a useful warning but has no legality. For two reasons. First, because unlike the stage, the screen possesses as many resources as fiction, so that, for example, extended narration is possible on screen, backed up by an extensive visual scenario, but not on the stage, where it must become monotonous; similarly, stream of consciousness has its filmic equivalents in montage, voice-over dialogue, closeups and extreme closeups, dissolves, etc., whereas on stage, as mere verbiage, it cannot fail to bore. Secondly, because the screen can fully illustrate what the novel can only name or describe. Of course, this is a mixed blessing, because such illustration can make things overexplicit and oppressive; still, it is there as a resource for those who can effectively handle it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So, too, no doubt, Homer had his Homer, and Orpheus his Orpheus, in the dim antiquity which preceded them. The mythological system... of the ancients,--and it is still the mythology of the moderns, the poem of mankind,--interwoven so wonderfully with their astronomy, and matching in grandeur and harmony the architecture of the heavens themselves, seems to point to a time when a mightier genius inhabited the earth. But, after all, man is the great poet, and not Homer nor Shakespeare; and our language itself, and the common arts of life, are his work. Poetry is so universally true and independent of experience that it does not need any particular biography to illustrate it, but we refer it sooner or later to some Orpheus or Linus, and after ages to the genius of humanity and the gods themselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those ...which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am so far from thinking the maxims of Confucius and Jesus Christ to differ, that I think the plain and simple maxims of the form...er, will help to illustrate the more obscure ones of the latter, accommodated to the then way of speaking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not "Seeing is Believing" you ninny, but "Believing is Seeing." For modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and o...ther works exist only to illustrate the text.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think the people over here are coming to realize what would happen if Germany and Italy won a European war. We would be out of t...he picture entirely.... If I were a German conqueror what would I do? Obviously I would have the British navy out of the way and the French army out of the way.... The first thing I would do is look around and say, "What outside territories do I want to take for myself?"... We are not quite ready to take on the United States but we can do it by indirection very nicely. We are going to dominate South America ... without violating the Monroe Doctrine. [FDR set forth a scenario of economic domination of Latin America by giving Argentina a choice of agreeing to German domination of its army by economic blackmail by virtue of the fact that Germany controlled all the agricultural markets in Europe on which Argentina depended for livelihood and the same for Brazil.] It is a perfectly open and shut thing and, if you have the complete, physical power to do it, you win.... [F]rom Hitler's point of view, it is rational. And, if any of us were in his place, with his methods, we would do it. I made myself a hump-back, dyed my skin in several places with great spots of yellow; so that, when I look'd in the glass, I was almost frighten'd at my own figure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »