
Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 61-63
In; Victor Frisch, Joseph Twadell Shipley (1939). Auguste Rodin. p. 203: About the act of creation.
1900s-1940s
Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 61-63
“It is useless to seek the soul of things beneath their surface, for their surface is their soul.”
“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.”
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Printing methods and their bearing on pictorial photography, p. 71
“We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.”
1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Experience
On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)
Context: The formal character of a living literature is the same as its inner character: it denies verities; it denies what everyone knows and what I have known until this moment. It departs from the canonical tracks, from the broad highway. … To literature today the plane surface of daily life is what the earth is to an airplane — a mere runway from which to take off, in order to rise aloft, from daily life to the realities of being, to philosophy, to the fantastic. Let yesterday's cart creak along the well-paved highways. The living have strength enough to cut away their yesterday.