Of all the nations in the world the French are the most renowned for singing over their grievances. Of that country it has been remarked with some truth, that its whole history may be traced in its songs.
~ Charles MacKay
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Author Archives: Seamas Anstruther
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I had never encountered anything like the world or the words of Chester Himes. But I knew I wanted more. The next book I devoured was “Blind Man With a Pistol,” a deeply twisted and morally ambiguous novel about the senseless nature of violence. A work that is both terrifying and philosophical, it was a watershed moment for this young wannabe writer that also just happens to have one of the most fearless endings in crime fiction history.
~ S.A. Cosby via The New York Times
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I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.
~ Henri-Louis Bergson
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The virtue that falls furthest in the pagan pantheon of traits is humility. In the ancient Greek epics, humility is not even reckoned a virtue.
~ David Wolpe via The Atlantic
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Of course, art turns many people away for there has to be a limit. The limits between the gifted and the ungifted.
~ Elfriede Jelinek
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Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.
~ Erwin Schrödinger
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The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.
~ Charles Dickens
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Whatever else it is, Jewish nationalism — that is, Zionism — is the oldest continuous anticolonial movement in history, starting well before the Romans sought to de-Judaize the area by calling their Levantine colony Palestina. Hanukkah, the festival of lights, is one such reminder, celebrating the recovery of Jerusalem from colonizing Greeks in the second century B.C.E.
~ Brett Stephens via The New York Times
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When I hear people speak of the evolution of an artist, it seems to me that they are considering him standing between two mirrors that face each other and reproduce his image an infinite number of times, and that they contemplate the successive images of one mirror as his past, and the images of the other mirror as his future, while his real image is taken as his present. They do not consider that they all are the same images in different planes.
~ Pablo Picasso
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Good design is as little as possible. Less, but better, because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.
~ Dieter Rams
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