The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. . . . They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; - cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame.
The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.
I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.
Art serves us best precisely at that point where it can shift our sense of what is possible, when we know more than we knew before, when we feel we have - by some manner of a leap - encountered the truth. That, by the logic of art, is always worth the pain.
Now an army is exposed to six several calamities, not arising from natural causes, 1 but from faults for which the general is responsible. These are: (1) Flight; (2) insubordination; (3) collapse; (4) ruin; (5) disorganisation; (6) rout.
Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind! Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art, For there thy habitation is the heart-- The heart which love of thee alone can bind; And when thy sons to fetters are consign'd-- To fetters and damp vault's dayless gloom, Their country conquers with their martyrdom.
Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.
A Classical style... is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country; it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience.
But the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
Shall I compare thee to a summer day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate... When in eternal lines to time thou growst So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
I remember my emotions the day we watched Nelson Mandela walk out of prison Writing & literature in South Africa during the anti-apartheid years, became a 'cultural weapon.' You had to use it to fight apartheid & some of us resisted that in the end, you recognize that you are facing a government that has no scruples about using culture & art to oppress you.