Mike S
@mas
Mike S
the main principle of art, the principle which is in most danger of being forgotten in our time. I mean the fact that art consists of limitation; the fact that art is limitation. Art does not consist in expanding things. Art consists of cutting things down,
G. K. Chesterton • The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]
live upon their wits (or not so much, perhaps, upon the presence of their own wits as upon the absence of wits in other people)
Charles Dickens • Nicholas Nickleby: By Charles Dickens : Illustrated
Whether there is a long-run direction in evolution, and whether that direction is to be considered progress are of course two different questions.
Herbert A. Simon • The Sciences of the Artificial
they were too much troubled and knocked about to learn; they could no more do that to advantage, than any one can do anything to advantage in a life of constant misfortune, torment, and worry.
Charles Dickens • David Copperfield
Ambivalence of parenting:
For the goodness of good things, like the badness of bad things, is a prodigy past speech; it is to be pictured rather than spoken. We shall have gone deeper than the deeps of heaven and grown older than the oldest angels before we feel, even in its first faint vibrations, the everlasting violence of that double passion with which God hates and loves the world.
(Chesterton, Manalive)
A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences.
Gene Wolfe • The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Three Novellas
Quotes on Models and Their Uses
Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day
“highest happiness and deepest misery” — having children?
“There is no happiness save in understanding the whole”
Do you, I wonder, little children, who read this story? Or are you like the boy in the kindergarten to whom I was telling a fairy story and who interrupted me contemptuously with the remark: "Fairies don't exist!" "O don't they my little man!" said I. "Well you think so." Presently we read of a ball that grew, and he s
... See moreMargaret Arndt • Fairy Tales from the German Forests
But the faults exist; and nothing was ever more dangerous to everybody concerned than the recent fashion of denying or ignoring them. It was done simply by the snobbish habit of suppressing the experience and evidence of the majority of people, and especially of the majority of poor people. It was done by confining the controversy to a small world
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