Tag: Quote

The Authentic Feel of Unpolished Expression

Of course Bernard didn’t realise the song wasn’t in his key. None of us did. We didn’t know anything about stuff like that. We always wrote the music first, and what I’d always loved about Barney’s vocals was the unintentional strained quality as he tried to fit into the track. Like Ian, he wasn’t blessed with the world’s best singing voice, but it had emotion, passion, and to me the struggle in Bernard’s voice was a major part of the band’s appeal. (I agree with David Byrne, who said, ‘The better a singer’s voice, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying.’)

Substance: Inside New Order
Peter Hook

I Like the Bricks More Than the Building – Nietzsche quote

Error of philosophers: The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building. But posterity discovers it in the bricks that he used and which others will often make use of again for better building; in the fact, that is to say, that the building can be destroyed and nevertheless possess value as material.

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878)

Epigraph found in:
Heidegger in Ruins
Richard Wolin

The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame – Chesterton Quote

Over the past couple of years, I volunteered to teach in the West Tennessee State Penitentiary, where I was part of a faculty cohort that offers humanities seminars to incarcerated women.

The program director had invited me to discuss a play, but I didn’t think I could do justice to a drama in just two brief sessions. So we read Shakespeare’s sonnets instead. Right choice! One student, Aja, was so enthusiastic that she came to the first class having already translated her favorite into her own verse.

The sparse classroom has a corkboard on one wall whose dimensions mirror the shape of a sonnet on the page, giving us a good visual analogue for the form: why would an artist choose to work within such a frame? G. K. Chesterton, who held that art consists in limitation, was only half jesting when he asserted that the most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

How to Think like Shakespeare
Scott Newstok

From the footnotes, original source:
Cited by Ian Ker, Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford University Press, 2012), 254.

Growing Old Together – You and What You Fear

..here he was on Broadway, his hair iron-gray, his stare wild, his walk unsteady, his hands flailing at the air. His clothes were out of the men’s shelter, and his face so ill-looking you wanted to put him in a hospital for a month before we even discussed the situation.

My mother looked curiously at me. “Why were you afraid of him?” she asked. “You could knock him over with one hand.”

“Ma, he didn’t look like that twelve years ago. Believe me. She continued to stare after him as he shambled down Broadway, bumping into people left and right.

“You’re growing old together,” she said to me. “You and what frightens you.”

Fierce Attachments
Vivian Gornick

Attention and Belief – Chat GPT Explains William James Quote

Our attention and beliefs are the same fact – did william james say this and if so, where

William James, a prominent American philosopher and psychologist, did write about the relationship between attention and belief. However, he did not express the idea that “our attention and beliefs are the same fact” in those exact words.

In his book “The Principles of Psychology,” James discussed how attention and belief are intimately connected. He argued that our beliefs influence what we attend to, and what we attend to influences our beliefs. In his words, “What we attend to is what we believe in.”

He also emphasized that attention and belief are both active processes that shape our perception of the world. As he put it, “Belief and attention are motor phenomena, and only through the study of their motor consequences can we get at their nature.”

So, while James did not explicitly state that attention and belief are the same fact, he did see them as closely intertwined and mutually influencing.

Signs We Can’t Read – Dogs in a Library – William James Quote

I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things. But, just as many of the dog’s and cat’s ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own.

Pragmatism
William James

Visiting a Long-imagined Place, Flaubert Quote

Cairo, January 5, 1850
You ask me whether the Orient is up to what I imagined it to be. Yes, it is, and more than that it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind. Facts have taken the place of suppositions – so excellently that it is often as though I were suddenly coming upon old and forgotten dreams.

Flaubert and Madame Bovary
Francis Steegmuller

Alberto Giacometti Breaks Leg, Sartre quote

One evening, more than twenty years ago, Giacometti was hit by a car while crossing the Place d’Italie. Though his leg was twisted, his first feeling, in the state of lucid swoon into which he had fallen, was a kind of joy: “Something has happened to me at last!” I know his radicalism: he expected the worst. The life he so loved and which he would not have changed for any othe was knocked out of joint, perhaps shattered, by the stupid violence of the chance: “So,” he thought to himself, “I wasn’t meant to be a sculptor, nor even to live. I wasn’t meant for anything.” What thrilled him was the menacing order of causes that was suddenly unmasked and the act of staring with the petrifying gaze of a cataclysm at the lights of the city, at human beings, at his own body lying flat in the mud: for a sculptor, the mineral world is never far away. I admire that will to welcome everything. If one likes surprises, one must like them to that degree, one must like even the rare flashes which reveal to devotees that the earth is not meant for them.

The Words
Jean-Paul Sartre