There is a tendency to discuss surrealism and cubism as if one proceeds out of the other, but in fact there is no similarity. Cubi...sm was a way of painting that a group of painters imposed on themselves, surrealism a philosophy of life put forward by a band of poets. The first was essentially a method of breaking up the object and putting it together again according to concepts of pictorial structure, a phase of the greatest importance in the development of such painters as Picasso, Braque, Marcoussis, and Gris, but affecting literature only through Apollinaire, and life hardly at all. The second was the attempt of a highly organized group to change life altogether, to make a new kind of man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our presidents have been getting to be synthetic monsters, the work of a hundred ghost- writers and press agents so that it is get...ting harder and harder to discover the line between the man and the institution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He winged away on a wildgoup's chase across the kathartic ocean and made synthetic ink and sensitive paper for his own end out of ...his wit's waste.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How separate and unearthly love is, Or women are, or what they do,... Or in our young unreal wishes Seem to be: synthetic, new, And natureless in ecstasies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In every philosophical school, three thinkers succeed one another in the following way: the first produces out of himself the sap ...and seed, the second draws it out into threads and spins a synthetic web, and the third waits in this web for the sacrificial victims that are caught in it--and tries to live off philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, i...t was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic ...statements, which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The analytical writer observes the reader as he is; accordingly, he makes his calculation, sets his machine to make the appropriat...e effect on him. The synthetic writer constructs and creates his own reader; he does not imagine him as resting and dead, but lively and advancing toward him. He makes that which he had invented gradually take shape before the reader's eyes, or he tempts him to do the inventing for himself. He does not want to make a particular effect on him, but rather enters into a solemn relationship of innermost symphilosophy or sympoetry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of the two is almost always a prevailing tendency of every author: either not to say some things which certainly should be sai...d, or to say many things which did not need to be said. The first is the original sin of synthetic natures, the latter of analytical natures.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »