The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
“The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and … often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.”
—
Václav Havel
,
book
Disturbing the Peace
Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 3 : Facing the Establishment
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Václav Havel 126
playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of … 1936–2011Related quotes
“The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.”
Gustave Flaubert
(1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)
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.
Paul DiMaggio
(1951) American sociologist
Source: Introduction to The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, 1991, p. 1
“Just as we suffer from excess in all things, so we suffer from excess in literature; thus we learn our lessons, not for life, but for the lecture room.”
Quemadmodum omnium rerum, sic litterarum quoque intemperantia laboramus: non vitae sed scholae discimus.
Seneca the Younger
(-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist
Alternate translation: Not for life, but for school do we learn. (translator unknown)
Alternate translation: We are taught for the schoolroom, not for life. (translator unknown).
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter CVI: On the corporeality of virtue, Line 12