“I do not seek to copy nature. I, on the contrary, create to divert me such faith and dreams as living among men would tend to destroy.”

The Gander, in Book Seven : What Saraïde Wanted, Ch. XLV : The Gander Also Generalizes
The Silver Stallion (1926)
Context: I do not seek to copy nature. I, on the contrary, create to divert me such faith and dreams as living among men would tend to destroy. But as it is, my worshipers depart from me heartedly, in this grey corridor, and they are devoid of fear and parvanimity; for the effect of my singing, like that of all great singing, is to fill my hearers with a sentiment of their importance as moral beings and the greatness of their destinies.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I do not seek to copy nature. I, on the contrary, create to divert me such faith and dreams as living among men would t…" by James Branch Cabell?
James Branch Cabell photo
James Branch Cabell 130
American author 1879–1958

Related quotes

Khalil Gibran photo

“I would be the least among men with dreams and the desire to fulfill them, rather than the greatest with no dreams and no desires.”

Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese artist, poet, and writer

Sand and Foam (1926)

Paul Gauguin photo

“Don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amide nature, extrapolate art from it and concentrate on what you will create as a result.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1870s - 1880s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), pp. 5 & 22: Gauguin is advising a fellow painter, 1885

Jacques Ellul photo

“It tends on the contrary, to create a completely independent technical morality.”

Source: The Technological Society (1954), p. 97
Context: A principal characteristic of technique … is its refusal to tolerate moral judgments. It is absolutely independent of them and eliminates them from its domain. Technique never observes the distinction between moral and immoral use. It tends on the contrary, to create a completely independent technical morality.
Here, then, is one of the elements of weakness of this point of view. It does not perceive technique's rigorous autonomy with respect to morals; it does not see that the infusion of some more or less vague sentiment of human welfare cannot alter it. Not even the moral conversion of the technicians could make a difference. At best, they would cease to be good technicians. This attitude supposes further that technique evolves with some end in view, and that this end is human good. Technique is totally irrelevant to this notion and pursues no end, professed or unprofessed.

Tanith Lee photo
Paul Gauguin photo

“I do not paint by copying nature. Everything I do springs from my wild imagination.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 22: quote in a letter to Ambroise Vollard, 1900

Marie François Xavier Bichat photo

“One seeks the definition of life in abstract considerations: it will be found, I believe, in this general insight: life is that group of functions which resist death.
Such is the mode of existence of living bodies that everything surrounding them tends to destroy them.”

Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802) French anatomist and physiologist

Original: (fr) On cherche dans des considérations abstraites la définition de la vie ; on la trouvera, je crois, dans cet aperçu général : la vie est l'ensemble des fonctions qui résistent à la mort. Tel est en effet le mode d'existence des corps vivans, que tout ce qui les entoure tend à les détruire.

Recherches Physiologiques sur la Vie et la Mort (1800) Translation: [Psychological medicine, 7, 378, 1977, https://books.google.com/books?id=ocNOAQAAIAAJ]

Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Xavier Bichat / Quotes

Jane Austen photo
Jean Metzinger photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“I am by the law of my nature a reasoner. A person who should suppose I meant by that word, an arguer, would not only not understand me, but would understand the contrary of my meaning.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

1 March 1834.
Table Talk (1821–1834)
Context: I am by the law of my nature a reasoner. A person who should suppose I meant by that word, an arguer, would not only not understand me, but would understand the contrary of my meaning. I can take no interest whatever in hearing or saying any thing merely as a fact — merely as having happened. It must refer to something within me before I can regard it with any curiosity or care. My mind is always energic — I don't mean energetic; I require in every thing what, for lack of another word, I may call propriety, — that is, a reason why the thing is at all, and why it is there or then rather than elsewhere or at another time.

Emil M. Cioran photo

Related topics