“Any society at war with the past will necessarily produce an endless tidal wave of cultural artifacts that are short-lived, for the longer any film or book or song lasts, the more adverse it is to progress.”
Source: Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
“Beauty is what lies beyond usefulness. Beauty inspires loyalty and gives meaning to mere usefulness. We need useful things, but we love beautiful things. A building which is merely functional will not last, for people will not love it. They will get bored with it. The average football stadium now costs a billion dollars to build and lasts just thirty years, after which it appears dated, silly, and unfashionable. The Chartres Cathedral, on the other hand, is more beautiful than any sports complex on earth and it has been functional for more than 800 years. Beautiful things last because when they begin to fall apart, we tend to them, revive and restore them; however, when purely functional things fall apart, we tire of them and replace them.”
Source: Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
“The whole morality of the Sermon on the Mount belongs here; man takes a truly voluptuous pleasure in violating himself by exaggerated demands and then deifying this something in his soul that is so tyrannically taxing. In each ascetic morality, man prays to one part of himself as god and also finds its necessary to diabolify the rest.”
Source: Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
“The human animal, gifted with unique brainpower, stood askance from instinct's shackles, becoming a detached observer of the world. As the only creature daring to ask ‘why,’ it sought meaning and virgin-birthed the quadruplet firmaments of art, theology, politics, and philosophy.”
“Because that's all art is, in the end. One person trying to get another person they have never met to fall in love with them.”
Source: Margo's Got Money Troubles
“Can there be art without the human in it? Maybe that is what I wish to capture: beast as seen by beast, tree as seen by tree. I jest, but not really.”
Source: North Woods
“I golf like a Jackson Pollock painting, but that's balanced out by the fact that I paint like Jack Nicklaus golfs. My record is finishing in 63 strokes.”
Source: To be good at golf you must go full koala bear
“When I golf, I use just enough strokes to create a masterpiece, like I'm a painter. The score I post up would look great on a museum wall.”
Source: To be good at golf you must go full koala bear
“What is that beauty which the artist struggles to express from lumps of earth”
Source: A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man
“The most important of these things is that art challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature. Art sets the artist's passionate personal vision against the received ideas of its time. Art knows that recieved ideas are the enemies of art, as Flaubert told us in Bouvard and Pecuchet. Cliches are received ideas and so are ideologies, both those which depend on the sanction of invisible sky gods and those which do not. Without art, our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die.
Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist.
It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence.”
Source: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder