“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.”
Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea
Tout existant naît sans raison, se prolonge par faiblesse et meurt par rencontre.
Nausea (1938)
“The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.”
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), I Prolegomena and General Introduction to the Book on Painting
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Leonardo Da Vinci363
Italian Renaissance polymath 1452–1519Related quotes
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), I Prolegomena and General Introduction to the Book on Painting
Nicole Oresme (1323–1382) French philosopher
Book II, Ch. 2, p. 279.
Le livre du ciel et du monde (1377)
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist
Source: The Woman Destroyed
Oliver Herford (1863–1935) American writer
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, as per Mackay's The Harvest of a Quiet Eye, A Selection of Scientific Quotations (1977), p. 34.
Misattributed
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist
As quoted in Mackay's The Harvest of a Quiet Eye, A Selection of Scientific Quotations (1977), p. 34
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic
The Conduct Of Life (1951)
Context: Now life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner. In life, we must begin to give a public performance before we have acquired even a novice's skill; and often our moments of seeming mastery are upset by new demands, for which we have acquired no preparatory facility. Life is a score that we play at sight, not merely before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but even before we have mastered our instruments; even worse, a large part of the score has been only roughly indicated, and we must improvise the music for our particular instrument, over long passages. On these terms, the whole operation seems one of endless difficulty and frustration; and indeed, were it not for the fact that some of the passages have been played so often by our predecessors that, when we come to them, we seem to recall some of the score and can anticipate the natural sequence of the notes, we might often give up in sheer despair. The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.
“The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.”
Speculum mentis est facies, et taciti oculi cordis fatentur arcana.
Jerome (345–420) Catholic saint and Doctor of the Church
Letter 54
Letters
“To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live
without mirrors is to live without the self.”
Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer
Selected Poems 1976-1986 (1987), Marrying the Hangman
Context: To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live
without mirrors is to live without the self. She is
living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and
on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice
comes through darkness and has no face. This voice
becomes her mirror.