Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor
Source: Rodin : the man and his art, with leaves from his notebook, 1917, p. 125
Sec. 78
The Gay Science (1882)
Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor
Source: Rodin : the man and his art, with leaves from his notebook, 1917, p. 125
Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi
Prologue p. 5
The Sabbath (1951)
“Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright
Jacques Derrida book Specters of Marx
"The Ends of Man," Margins of Philosophy, tr. w/ notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1982. (original French published in Paris, 1972, as Marges de la philosophie). p. 116
Specters of Marx (1993), 1970s
Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator
Source: The Beach (1941), Chapter 6, p. 36
Erich Auerbach Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
Source: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), p. 7
Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)
Context: The world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact... that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.... in a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise.... The medieval world was... not without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women... had no doubt that there was such a design, and their priests were well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not rational, at least coherent.... The situation we are presently in is much different.... sadder and more confusing and certainly more mysterious.... There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore... we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.
Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932
in text for catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel, 1982; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Abstract paintings' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/subjects-2/abstract-paintings-7 <br class="br">1980's