There is a continual exchange of ideas between all minds of a generation. Journalists, popular novelists, illustrators, and cartoo...nists adapt the truths discovered by the powerful intellects for the multitude. It is like a spiritual flood, like a gush that pours into multiple cascades until it forms the great moving sheet of water that stands for the mentality of a period.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Well, we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says [in Le dernier jour d'un condamné]:... we have an interval, and then our place k...nows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest in art and song. For our one chance is in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasm, or the "enthusiasm of humanity" [in Auguste Comte's Le système de politique positive]. Only, be sure it is passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the human condition to question one god after another, one appearance after another, or better, one apparition after another..., always pursuing the truth of the imagination, which is not the same as the truth of appearance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we speak, in gestures or signs, we fashion a real object in the world; the gesture is seen, the words and the song are heard.... The arts are simply a kind of writing, which, in one way or another, fixes words or gestures, and gives body to the invisible.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As opposed to the incoherent spectacle of the world, the real is what is expected, what is obtained and what is discovered by our ...own movement. It is what is sensed as being within our own power and always responsive to our action.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man himself is an enigma in motion; his questions never stay asked; whereas the mold, the footprint, and by natural extension, the... statue itself, like the vaults, the arches, the temples with which man records his own passing, remain immobile and fix a moment of man's life, upon which one might endlessly meditate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Finally, within a huge and sombre mass of things, A blackened people, living and dying in silence.... (Enfin, dans un amas de choses, sombre, immense, Un peuple noir, vivant et mourant en silence.)LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in citi...es have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »