What has reasoning to do with painting?
Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.
Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.
I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
We are living in a world in which we don't give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics of a lot of punk music and so on is very, life sucks and then you die, sort of theory. I feel life is cheaper and death is more attractive now than it was when I was an adolescent, as I remember. Suicide was a personal pathology when it was committed. There was no society approval of it, like there certainly is in Palestine and some quarters of Iraq.
Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?
Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
The pessimism of the intellect is the starting point for struggle. It's not the end point, it's the starting point. You have to make something critical to make it meaningful, to make it transformative.
Quite often when you help poor people, they don't think about the environment. They think about survival.
Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.
Yes, I will go. I would rather grieve over your absence than over you.