“A small but brilliant advance made today by someone’s awareness may for the moment reach a very small audience, but insofar as it’s valid and beautiful, it will make its way and become part of the whole world of consciousness. So in that sense it’s all working toward this huge audience, and all working toward a better man.”

— Conrad Aiken

The Paris Review interview (1963)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A small but brilliant advance made today by someone’s awareness may for the moment reach a very small audience, but ins…" by Conrad Aiken?

Conrad Aiken photo

Conrad Aiken 70

American novelist and poet 1889–1973

Related quotes

“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Interview with Jannika Hurwitt, published in Paris Review, 88 (Summer 1983) 82–127; reprinted in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Sixth Series (1984) (the interview took place in two parts: fall 1979/spring 1980)

“It is the destiny of our race to become united into one great body, thoroughly connected in all its parts, and possessed of similar culture. Nature, and even the passions and vices of Man, have from the beginning tended towards this end. A great part of the way towards it is already passed, and we may surely calculate that it will in time be reached.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte book The Vocation of Man

Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 88
The Vocation of Man (1800), Faith

“Very few writers of verse can read their work to keep their listeners aware of the beauty of sense, that sense of beauty from the powerful, delicate ways in which sense is made by poetry.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

'Poetry' September 1995

“Were it not well, then, to begin with the substance, to learn to apprehend the reality of that kingdom which is all around us now, whether we recognize it or not, — to take our aims and endeavors into it, that they may be made part of it, however small, — to surrender ourselves to it, that our lives may do something towards its advancement, and that we may become fellow-workers, however humble, with all the wise and good who have gone before us, and with Him who made them what they are?”

John Campbell Shairp (1819–1885) British writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 269.

“I felt that everything is beautiful, but [not? ] that which man tries intentionally to make beautiful; that the work of an ordinary bricklayer is more valid than the artwork of all but a very few artists.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

Quotes from 'Notes from 1969', Ellsworth Kelly; as quoted in the exhibition catalogue, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 13 December
1969 - 1980

“Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

pg 82
Identity (1998)

“To wonder what was so radical about a movement which seemed to demand "only" the cessation of fraudulent work, is to fail to perceive the inner truth of the valid assumption, made on every side, of the connection between frame-breaking and sedition. As if the fight by the producer for the integrity of his work-life can be made without calling the whole of capitalism into question. The demand for the cessation of fraudulent work necessarily becomes a cataclysm, an all-or-nothing battle insofar as it is pursued; it leads directly to the heart of the capitalist relationship and its dynamic.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Source: Elements of Refusal (1988), pp. 108-109

“The world of architecture – and of works conceived for architecture – tends towards beauty. True beauty tends towards ugliness and panic.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

short quotes, May 1972; p. 87
1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

“It is what makes conscious of the conditions and laws of observing which applied in this manner become a theme on its own. The activity of consciousness depending on the way the work itself proceeds, becomes the subject of my attention this way and it is precisely because of this voyeuristic attitude toward the own observation and experience of the subject that the conscious analytic dimension in the work shows.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

Source: undated quotes, Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 – 2003,' (2004), p. 30 : About the ambivalence in his own work.

“They wanted to know how I succeeded in getting so much publicity, I said by having a small audience, I said if you have a big audience you have no publicity, this did seem to worry them and naturally it would worry them they wanted the publicity and the big audience, and really to have the biggest publicity you have to have a small one, yes all right the biggest publicity comes from the realest poetry and the realest poetry has a small audience not a big one, but it is really exciting and therefore it has the biggest publicity, all right that is it.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 4

Related topics