
Nelson Mandela in his autobiography, as quoted by Keegan Hamilton in the Grantland blog entry "Remembering Mandela, the Boxer" (December 6, 2013) http://grantland.com/the-triangle/remembering-mandela-the-boxer/
2000s
Nelson Mandela in his autobiography, as quoted by Keegan Hamilton in the Grantland blog entry "Remembering Mandela, the Boxer" (December 6, 2013) http://grantland.com/the-triangle/remembering-mandela-the-boxer/
2000s
Literature and Revolution (1924), edited by William Keach (2005), Ch. 4 : Futurism, p. 120
Variants:
Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.
Remarks apparently derived from Trotsky's observations, or those he implies preceded his own, this is attributed to Bertolt Brecht in Paulo Freire : A Critical Encounter (1993) by Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard, p. 80, and to Vladimir Mayakovsky in The Political Psyche (1993) by Andrew Samuels, p. 9
Art is not a mirror held up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.
Context: Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes. But at present even the handling of a hammer is taught with the help of a mirror, a sensitive film that records all the movements. Photography and motion-picture photography, owing to their passive accuracy of depiction, are becoming important educational instruments in the field of labor. If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the "mirror" of literature? Of course no one speaks about an exact mirror. No one even thinks of asking the new literature to have mirror-like impassivity. The deeper literature is, and the more it is imbued with the desire to shape life, the more significantly and dynamically it will be able to "picture" life.
“To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.”
“The truth is never taken
From another.
One carries it always
By oneself.
Katsu!”
Japanese Death Poems. Compiled by Yoel Hoffmann. ISBN 978-0-8048-3179-6
Source: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), p. 319
Context: The body was born and it will die. But for the soul there is no death. It is like the betel-nut. When the nut is ripe it does not stick to the shell. But when it is green it is difficult to separate it from the shell. After realizing God, one does not identify oneself any more with the body. Then one knows that body and soul are two different things.
“To age truly was to suffer the ultimate treason, that of one’s body against oneself.”
Source: Words of Radiance
Alfred Binet (1894). Psychologies des grands calculateurs et joueurs d’echecs. Paris: Hachette. p. 71; As cited in: John Carson, "Minding matter/mattering mind: Knowledge and the subject in nineteenth-century psychology." in: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C. 30.3 (1999): p. 363
Book 1; On the necessity of standards
Mozi