Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer,
Ryan Holiday • Ego is the Enemy: The Fight to Master Our Greatest Opponent
Albert Camus wrote in his Notebooks of 1935–42: “Feelings and images multiply a philosophy by ten. People can only think in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.”
Charles Johnson • The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling
From George Saunders, on nuance and embracing complexity:
... See morethe writer doesn't have to have a fixed firm idea, but has to be able to take the reader on a journey to remind her that the world is complicated. From the very beginning, I understood writing to be about some kind of moral or ethical imperative. Absent that, I'm not that interested in it,
"Niels Lyhne"
Rainer Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet
The artist is distinguished from all other responsible actors in society — the politicians, legislators, educators, and scientists — by the fact that he is his own test tube, his own laboratory, working according to very rigorous rules, however unstated these may be, and cannot allow any consideration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all
... See moreMaria Popova • James Baldwin on the Creative Process and the Artist’s Responsibility to Society
I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there
... See moreG. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton • Orthodoxy
This is really the form that the dilemma takes. It is not solely a question of keeping the body alive; it is rather how not to be killed. Not to be killed becomes the great end, and morality takes its meaning from that center. Until that center is shifted, nothing real can be accomplished. It is the uncanny and perhaps unwitting recognition of this
... See more