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Quote by Joshua Gibbs

“Physical beauty is eminently more impressive, visceral, and humbling than artistic Beauty. Were a human being the likes of Nicole Kidman or Paul Newman to stand on display in the Metropolitan or the Louvre, and were patrons of the museum able to gaze with impunity—not covertly and from a distance, but from point blank range as though the living spectacles were mere portraits— many people would quickly leave behind the artistic beauty of Rembrandt and Titian.”

Quote by Joshua Gibbs

Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

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Joshua Gibbs

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“Beauty is a liability. “Beauty will save the world,” but don’t tell the Trojans that. “Save the world? Beauty is tearing the world apart!” Any starry-eyed messiah quoting Dostoyevsky from the walls of Troy would have been pitched over. The beauty of Helen threw the cosmos out of whack. The beauty of Sarai jeopardized Abram’s trip into Egypt. So, too, a beautiful sunbather may upset the peace of a family trip to the beach and a beautiful priest might easily distract from mass or compromise confession.”

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Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“As soon as one generation undertakes a project which can be finished in a single lifetime, their children have incentive to scrap that project in favor of projects more suited to their own tastes and values. Any social or cultural project which will take fifty years to accomplish encounters profound existential threats halfway through, for everyone who started the project begins to age out of productivity and those have just entered the project have both incentive and ability to redirect time and funds to a more fashionable project which does not seem so old-fashioned.”

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Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Any cultural project which only takes ten years to complete is easily undone. As an ideology, then, the problem with “Change the world” is that it is too easily accomplished. “Change” is doable over and over again, and new projects of “change” undermine and abolish the changes of a previous generation. Everyone who “changes the world” is undermining or abolishing the change some wide-eyed, well-meaning dreamer undertook just a few years ago. “Change the world” always involves crushing the dream of someone slightly older than yourself who wanted to do the same thing. Thus we reach a paradox: unless a society undertakes a project it cannot hope to accomplish, it will not accomplish anything lasting.”

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Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“And once more, we’re not having a serious conversation about the future of music unless we’re talking about public funding, cooperatives, unions, and international solidarity—and unless we realize that the fight for a more liberated and de-commodified cultural sphere is part of the broader struggle for a better world”

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Book:Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
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