“The public wants work which flatters its illusions.”

— Gustave Flaubert

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Gustave Flaubert98

French writer (1821–1880) 1821–1880

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“Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.”

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“It is the shared bad faith by which individuals help each other sustain the illusion that they can shirk their spiritual destiny by joining the public.”

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Source: Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (1992), p. 49

“If instead of doing the real work of love you start doing organized propaganda work for me, it is absurd. I need no propaganda or publicity. I do not want propaganda and publicity, but I do want love and honesty.”

Meher Baba (1894–1969) Indian mystic

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Context: If instead of doing the real work of love you start doing organized propaganda work for me, it is absurd. I need no propaganda or publicity. I do not want propaganda and publicity, but I do want love and honesty. If you cannot live the life of love and honesty, you should stop working for me. I am quite capable of doing my Universal Work alone.

“To mark a man's faults and failings was, for Johnson, to indicate where he had diverged from his true relation to God; for Strachey it was an agreeable intellectual pastime, which flattered his sense of superiority both to his subject and to the illusion-ridden mob.”

Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) British writer

Hugh Kingsmill The Progress of a Biographer (1949) p. 7.
Criticism

“I wanted my work to be seen for free in a public space, I want to be up there with Pollock and de Kooning, one of the big boys.”

Stella Vine (1969) English artist

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“Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress at work.”

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“The fine art world and the commercial art industry are both all about money. It's hard to say which is more contemptible: the fine art world with its double talk and pretensions to the cultural high ground, or the world of commercial art trying to sell to the largest mass market it can reach. A serious artist really shouldn't be too deeply involved in either of these worlds. It's best to be on the fringe of them. In general, if you want to be a success and make the money, you have to play the game. It's no different in the fine art world, it's just a slightly different game. Essentially, you're marketing an illusion. It's much easier to lie to humans and trick them than to tell them the truth. They'd much rather be bamboozled than be told the truth, because the way to trick them is to flatter them and tell them what they want to hear, to reinforce their existing illusions. They don't want to know the truth. Truth is a bring-down, a bummer, or it's just too complicated, too much mental work to grasp.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 297

“Tryin' to get control,
Pressure's takin' its toll.
Stuck in the middle zone,
I just want you alone.
My guessing game is strong,
Way too real to be wrong.
Caught up in your show,
Yeah, at least now I know.It wasn't love, it wasn't love,
It was a perfect illusion (Perfect illusion).
Mistaken for love, it wasn't love,
It was a perfect illusion (Perfect illusion).
You were a perfect illusion.”

Lady Gaga (1986) American singer, songwriter, and actress

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“We can start to clean up these terribly burdensome regulations. We can make the tax code much simpler, much flatter, so that it works for everyday people, so we’re incentivizing work. And I want to go down there and actually get things done”

Patrick Morrisey (1967) West Virginia politician

West Virginia AG Patrick Morrisey: Washington Is Broken, and Sen. Manchin Is Part of the Swamp http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2017/10/13/wv-ag-morrisey-washington-broken-manchin-swamp/ (October 13, 2017)

“In this precise sense, Kant was "the inventor of the philosophical history of philosophy": there are necessary stages in the development of philosophy, that is, one cannot directly get at the truth, one cannot begin wit it, philosophy necessarily began with metaphysical illusions. The path from illusion to its critical denunciation is the very core of philosophy, which means that successful ("true") philosophy is no longer defined by its truthful explanation of the totality of being, but by successfully accounting for the illusions, that is, by explaining not only why illusions are illusions, but also why they are structurally necessary, unavoidable, and not just accidents.”

Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher

Introduction
Less Than Nothing (2012)

“The public wants work which flatters its illusions.”

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