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 most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigge...r and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera--and himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The world is filled with the proverbs and acts and winkings of a base prudence, which is a devotion to matter, as if we possessed ...no other faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear; a prudence which adores the Rule of Three, which never subscribes, which never gives, which seldom lends, and asks but one question of any project,--Will it bake bread?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores publi...c opinion, the other, private opinion; one, fame, the other, desert; one, feats, the other, humility; one, lucre, the other, love; one, monopoly, and the other, hospitality of mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step downward, is a step upward. The man who renounces ...himself, comes to himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let us say, then, that both the realist and the antirealist accept the results of scientific investigations as "true," on a par wi...th more homely truths.... And call this acceptance of scientific truths the "core position." What distinguishes realists from antirealists, then, is what they add onto this core position ... a third alternative emerges--and an attractive one at that. It is the core position itself, and all by itself.... Let me introduce the acronym NOA (pronounced as in "Noah"), for natural ontological attitude, and, henceforth, refer to the core position under that designation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, n...ot only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself--by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When he who adores thee has left but the name Of his fault and his sorrows behind,... O! say wilt thou weep, when they darken the fame Of a life that for thee was resign'd!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Well then! Wagner was a revolutionary--he fled the Germans.... As an artist one has no home in Europe outside Paris: the délicate...sse in all five artistic senses that is presupposed by Wagner's art, the fingers for nuances, the psychological morbidity are found only in Paris. Nowhere else is this passion in questions of form to be found, this seriousness in mise en scène--which is Parisian seriousness par excellence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and... the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »