Quotes #12 - Virtue

"Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing."
GK Chesterton, A Piece of Chalk, as quoted in Janet Malcolm's Forty-One False Starts

Quotes #11 Life

"Too bad she won't live. But then again, who does?"
Bladerunner, 1982

"You only live once,
And that's not guaranteed."
He's Gone, Doris Duke, 1969

Quotes #10: likes

"You should not feel guilty about coveting your neighbour's wife if she is better looking or more fun. You cannot really change what you like."
James Watson, Nobel-prizewinning biologist, as interviewed by Christopher Swann for the Financial Times (2004)

"It is in the nature of the mind that the more we cultivate and familiarize ourselves with positive emotions, the more powerful they become."
The Dalai Lama on Twitter, 2017

Quotes #8: Humour(lessness)

But then, the defining characteristic of self-styled “voices of the people” is their total and utter humourlessness, which has its roots in a terror of being undermined.
Marina Hyde in the Guardian, writing about lowest-common-denominator populism

During the civil war people complained about Lincoln's funny stories. Perhaps he sensed that strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.
Ravelstein, Saul Bellow

Quotes #7: the volume of liberal humanism

“I’ve always said to my kids, the hardest thing to listen to – your instincts, your human personal intuition – always whispers; it never shouts. Very hard to hear.”

Steven Spielberg as interviewed by Tom Shone for the Guardian

Quotes #6: Life

"One day, toward the end of a conversation I was having with the painter David Salle in his studio, on White Street, he looked at me and said, "Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever thought that your real life hasn't begun yet?"
"I think I know what you mean."
"You know - soon. Soon you'll start your real life."
Forty-One False Starts, Janet Malcolm

"Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans."
Cartoonist Allen Saunders

"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."
Fight Club

Quotes #5: Voss, Patrick White, 1957

Voss is a brilliant novel, of the utmost insight into human nature and character-building. Here are some highlights:

The terrible simplicity of people who have not yet been hurt.

I would welcome dangers. One must not expect to avoid suffering.

To explore the depths of one's own repulsive nature is more than irresistible - it is necessary.

Few people of attainment take easily to a plan of self-improvement. Some discover very early their perfection cannot endure the insult. Others find their intellectual pleasure lies in the theory, not the practice.

Places yet unvisited can become an obsession, promising final peace, all goodness.

As if to rot were avoidable. By moving. But it was not. We rot by living.

Perhaps true knowledge only comes of death by torture in the country of the mind.

I suggest you wring it [hope] out for yourself, which, in the end, is all that is possible for any man.

The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.

Mediocrity is not a final and irrevocable state; rather it is a creative source of endless variety and subtlety.

Quotes#4: Philip Larkin and Nas

Philip Larkin, in his poem Dockery and Son:

Life is first boredom, then fear, 

Whether we use it or not, it goes,

And leaves what something hidden from us chose...

Nas in New York State of Mind:

It drops deep, as it does in my breath/

I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death/

Beyond the walls of intelligence, life is defined/

I think of crime, when I'm in a New York State of Mind

Quotes #3: Saul Bellow

I liked this column by Jay Rayner in the Guardian, on what an exasperatingly circumscribing retort is "first-world problems", with the standfirst:

"It is possible to disapprove of machine-cut jamon and to feel outrage over Syria at the same time."

I often find the FWP retort quite amusing, but that doesn't mean I think it should be used to shut down consideration of anything other than disease, murder and starvation.

Here's Saul Bellow saying something similar in his novel More Die of Heartbreak:

"The sufferings of freedom also had to be considered. Otherwise we would be conceding a higher standard to totalitarianism, saying that only oppression could keep us honest."

Quotes #2: Jacques Herzog. Leonardo da Vinci's disgust and disbelief

For some reason I'm very struck by this comment from the architect Jacques Herzog in Rowan Moore's Guardian article about Herzog and his architectural partner, Pierre de Meuron. Here's the full paragraph for context:

Artists, says Herzog, are much better at uncertainty and instability than architects. He unexpectedly cites Leonardo da Vinci and the way he painted an angel’s wings: “You can see he was not a believer. When he paints the joint where the wings meet, when he has to work out how you attach a wing, you get a sense of his disgust and disbelief.” Great names of architecture, by contrast, seem to have no such doubt. “They were almost religious about their work, a bit absurd. Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier: how can they be such heroes?”

That paragraph, or Herzog's point, doesn't make much sense to me. The part about architects being religious about their work or absurd is fine, but if artists are "better" at uncertainty, why can Herzog apparently discern da Vinci's disgust? Shouldn't it be undetectable?

So it's not that I think Herzog makes a good point: it's the assertion he makes that strikes me.

To say that da Vinci, possibly the most revered artist of all, was so unbelieving as to be unable to keep disgust out of his depictions of angels' wings! Mein Gott! 

Quotes #1: Levi and Goethe

Primo Levi on writing:

"Paper is too tolerant a material. You can write any old absurdity on it and it never complains."

"One of the writer's great privileges is the possibility of remaining imprecise and vague."

Goethe on criticism, polemic and negativity:

"It is much easier to recognize error than to find truth: the former lies on the surface, this is quite manageable; the latter resides in depth, and this is not everyone's business."

"Error is continually repeated in action, and that is why we must not tire of repeating in words what is true."

"If I'm to listen to someone else's opinion, it must be put in a positive way; I have enough problematic speculations in my own head."