“Could we bring ourselves to feel what the first spectators of an Egyptian statue, or a Romanesque crucifixion, felt, we would make haste to remove them from the Louvre. True, we are trying more and more to gauge the feelings of those first spectators, but without forgetting our own, and we can be contented all the more easily with the mere knowledge of the former, without experiencing them, because all we wish to do is put this knowledge to the work of art.”

Part I, Chapter III
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

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André Malraux37

French novelist, art theorist and politician 1901–1976

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“All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves!”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

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The Complete Stories (1971)
Source: The Great Wall of China and Other Stories

“Make others feel the same way about it. Without their realizing it! That's the meaning of art... Yes, what I'm aiming for is the logical development of what we see and feel when we observe nature; only then I'm concerned with the process, processes being for us no more than simple ways of getting the public to feel what we ourselves are feeling, and of making our point. The great artists we admire have done no more... Shall we have lunch?”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 160, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif

“I want to know that I've done everything I could every day I think of all those people out there who are depending on us. I think about it. It does make me feel we need more work, more help. Get those spectators on the playing field, or out of the arena. Really, that is how I feel about it. I do what I can, and I do it the way I do everything… there's nothing part of the way for me.”

Tom Cruise (1962) American actor and film producer

Transcript of Tom Cruise on Scientology (January 16, 2008)

“The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness.
We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.
We feel that distrust has become nearly universal among men of affairs, and that the spread of public anxiety is poisoning human relations and drying up the roots of private freedom. We see that people at the top often identify rational dissent with political mutiny, loyalty with blind conformity, and freedom of judgment with treason. We feel that irresponsibility has become organized in high places and that clearly those in charge of the historic decisions of our time are not up to them. But what is more damaging to us is that we feel that those on the bottom-the forced actors who take the consequences-are also without leaders, without ideas of opposition, and that they make no real demands upon those with power.”

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) American sociologist

Source: Letters & Autobiographical Writings (1954), pp. 184-185.

“Art comes instinctively to us, but it is so uncertain. I have in front of me photographs of all Picasso’s best works. The mere I admire them the further I feel myself removed from all art, it seems so easy, so limited! We are part of the world creation, and we ourselves create nothing.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Source: 1930 - 1941, from 'Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 168: in a letter to his future wife Agnes Magruder (Mougouch), 7 Mai 1941

“Once we recognize that all historical knowledge is relational knowledge, and can only be formulated with reference to the position of the observer, we are faced, once more, with the task of discriminating between what is true and what is false in such knowledge.”

Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) Hungarian sociologist

Ideology and Utopia (1929)

“If we turn back to the time when the first compulsory education act was passed, we find that the capitalists of England fought these acts with all their might, but that they soon withdrew their opposition and supported them. For the employers recognised that though the children would know a little more, the amount could be so restricted that the result would only be to make them better wage slaves, knowing no more of freedom than what we have known and experienced of it.”

William Earsman (1884–1965) Australian left-wing activist

The Proletariat and Education: The Necessity for Labor Colleges

“I should wish, however, to know what this reason is, through which we are more excellent than all the tribes of animals. Is it because we have made for ourselves houses, by which we can avoid the cold of winter and heat of summer? What! do not the other animals show forethought in this respect? … But if nature, which gave them life, had chosen to give to them also hands to help them, they too would, without doubt, raise lofty buildings and strike out new works of art. Yet, even in those things which they make with beaks and claws, we see that there are many appearances of reason and wisdom which we men are unable to copy, however much we ponder them, although we have hands to serve us dexterously in every kind of work.”

Arnobius (255–327) Christian apologist

Book II, § 17
Adversus Nationes

“Spectator sports make people more passive, because you're not doing them—you're watching somebody doing them.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

"Sports" in How the World Works, p. 168
Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994, Secrets, Lies and Democracy, 1994

“The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance.”

Karl Popper (1902–1994) Austrian-British philosopher of science

Variant translation: The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, clear, and well-defined will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. The main source of our ignorance lies in the fact that our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963)
Context: The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance — the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

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André Malraux37

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