But among all our Methods of moving Pity or Terror, there is none so absurd and barbarous, and what more exposes us to the Contemp...t and Ridicule of our Neighbours, than that dreadful butchering of one another, which is so very frequent upon the English Stage. To delight in seeing Men stabbed, poisoned, racked, or impaled, is certainly the Sign of a cruel Temper: And as this is often practised before the British Audience, several French Criticks, who think these are grateful Spectacles to us, take Occasion from them to represent us a People that delight in Blood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The English Writers of Tragedy are possessed with a Notion, that when they represent a virtuous or innocent Person in Distress, th...ey ought not to leave him till they have delivered him out of his Troubles, or made him triumph over his Enemies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, in... the position of having almost infinitely free will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The trouble is that the expression 'material thing' is functioning already, from the very beginning, simply as a foil for 'sense-d...atum'; it is not here given, and is never given, any other role to play, and apart from this consideration it would surely never have occurred to anybody to try to represent as some single kind of things the things which the ordinary man says that he 'perceives.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and... conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everywhere--all over Africa and South America ... you see these suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people wa...nt. There's a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they're terrifying, because they are the death of the soul.... This is the prison this planet is being turned into.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
James Brown and Frank Sinatra are two different quantities in the universe. They represent two different experiences of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer... the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nay, if there's room for poets in this world A little overgrown (I think there is),... Their sole work is to represent the age, Their age, not Charlemagne's,--this live, throbbing age. That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, And spends more passion, more heroic heat, Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, Than Roland with his knights.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All cultural products contain a mixture of two elements: conventions and inventions. Conventions are elements which are known to b...oth the creator and his audience beforehand--they consist of things like favorite plots, stereotyped characters, accepted ideas, commonly known metaphors and other linguistic devices, etc. Inventions, on the other hand, are elements which are uniquely imagined by the creator, such as new kinds of characters, ideas, or linguistic forms.... Convention and invention have quite different cultural functions. Conventions represent familiar shared images and meanings and they assert an ongoing continuity of values; inventions confront us with a new perception of meaning which we have not realized before. Both these functions are important to culture. Conventions help maintain a culture's stability while inventions help it respond to changing circumstances and provide new information about the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »