“The great Christian art did not die because all possible forms had been used up; it died because faith was being transformed into piety.”
André Malraux, Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951) Part IV, Chapter VI
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)
Context: The great Christian art did not die because all possible forms had been used up; it died because faith was being transformed into piety. Now, the same conquest of the outside world that brought in our modern individualism, so different from that of the Renaissance, is by way of relativizing the individual. It is plain to see that man's faculty of transformation, which began by a remaking of the natural world, has ended by calling man himself into question.
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André Malraux37
French novelist, art theorist and politician 1901–1976Related quotes
James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) Missionary in China
(Hudson Taylor’s Choice Sayings: A Compilation from His Writings and Addresses. London: China Inland Mission, n.d., 29).
Variant: All God’s giants have been weak men, who did great things for God because they reckoned on His being with them.
Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian
The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter IV. The Middle Ages
“Today is doomed to die — because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born.”
Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937) Russian author
"Tomorrow" (1919), as translated in A Soviet Heretic : Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1970) edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg
Context: Every today is at the same time both a cradle and a shroud: a shroud for yesterday, a cradle for tomorrow. Today, yesterday, and tomorrow are equally near to one another, and equally far. They are generations, they are grandfathers, fathers, and grandsons. And grandsons invariably love and hate the fathers; the fathers invariably hate and love the grandfathers.
Today is doomed to die — because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born. Such is the wise and cruel law. Cruel, because it condemns to eternal dissatisfaction those who already today see the distant peaks of tomorrow; wise, because eternal dissatisfaction is the only pledge of eternal movement forward, eternal creation. He who has found his ideal today is, like Lot's wife, already turned to a pillar of salt, has already sunk into the earth and does not move ahead. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is an inevitable heresy of today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust. Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow. This is the constant dialectic path which in a grandiose parabola sweeps the world into infinity. Yesterday, the thesis; today, the antithesis, and tomorrow, the synthesis.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist
L 16
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook L (1793-1796)
Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor
US News & World Report (27 October 1986)
Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator
Global Ideas from Pluto's Challenger (May 21, 2009)
Hans Haacke (1936) conceptual political artist
1980s <br class="br">Source: Bois,Yve-Alain, Douglas Crimp, and Rosalind Krauss. " A Conversation with Hans Haacke http://www.kim-cohen.com/artmusictheoryassets/artmusictheorytexts/Haacke_Interview.PDF." in: October : The First Decade 30 (fall 1984): 23-48
Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author
What if you're wrong about the great Juju at the bottom of the sea? <br class="br">Answering audience questions after a reading of The God Delusion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mmskXXetcg, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, <br class="br">Posed question: "This is probably going to be the most simplest one for you to answer, but: What if you're wrong?"