“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”
Variant: Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
Source: Lolita
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Vladimir Nabokov 193
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor 1899–1977Related quotes
Pt. II, ch. 1, sec. 1.
Source: 1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
Source: House of Suns (2008), Chapter 12 (p. 152)
Source: Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970), Chapter 3, on dialogue.
“Time is the brush of God, as he paints his masterpiece on the heart of humanity.”
“I want to make my own life a masterpiece.”
Talks with Mussolini (1932), quoting earlier remarks
As quoted in " Duce (1922-42)" in TIME magazine (2 August 1943) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,777927-4,00.html
1930s
Variant: I shall make my own life a masterpiece.
What is Art? (1897)
Context: Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid. And in this, as in every movement, there are leaders — those who have understood the meaning of life more clearly than others — and of those advanced men there is always one who has in his words and life, manifested this meaning more clearly, accessibly, and strongly than others. This man's expression … with those superstitions, traditions, and ceremonies which usually form around the memory of such a man, is what is called a religion. Religions are the exponents of the highest comprehension of life … within a given age in a given society … a basis for evaluating human sentiments. If feelings bring people nearer to the religion's ideal … they are good, if these estrange them from it, and oppose it, they are bad.
