Here's to the stones throw into an ambivalent ocean... I guess it just depends on perspective if you think your ripples will matter....
If anyone is ever beaten by the wallows of life, and confides in art to save your proverbial soul, well there is hope yet for us...
"He who lives in the ideal and leaves it expressed in society or in art enjoys a double immortality. The eternal has absorbed him while he lived, and when he is dead his influence brings others to the same absorption, making them, through that ideal identity with the best in him, reincarnations and perennial seats of all in him which he could rationally hope to rescue from destruction. He can say, without any subterfuge or desire to delude himself, that he shall not wholly die; for he will have a better notion than the vulgar of what constitutes his being. By becoming the spectator and confessor of his own death and of universal mutation, he will have identified himself with what is spiritual in all spirits and masterful in all apprehension; and so conceiving himself, he may truly feel and know that he is eternal."
Thank you, Mr. George Santayana. At the turn of 20th century he taught philosophy at Harvard before leaving his post to travel and examine society and or humanity. He definitively shaped the minds of many including TS Elliot, Gertrude Stein, Walter Lippmann, W.E.B. Du Bois, Harry Austryn Wolfson amongst countless others.
Here are some of Santayana's other famous words that resonate empirical with me... enjoy
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
"Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them."
"It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation."
"Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind."
"Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good."
"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment."
"The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice."
"Art like life should be free, since both are experimental."
"The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
"I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty."
"There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval."
If anyone is ever beaten by the wallows of life, and confides in art to save your proverbial soul, well there is hope yet for us...
"He who lives in the ideal and leaves it expressed in society or in art enjoys a double immortality. The eternal has absorbed him while he lived, and when he is dead his influence brings others to the same absorption, making them, through that ideal identity with the best in him, reincarnations and perennial seats of all in him which he could rationally hope to rescue from destruction. He can say, without any subterfuge or desire to delude himself, that he shall not wholly die; for he will have a better notion than the vulgar of what constitutes his being. By becoming the spectator and confessor of his own death and of universal mutation, he will have identified himself with what is spiritual in all spirits and masterful in all apprehension; and so conceiving himself, he may truly feel and know that he is eternal."
Thank you, Mr. George Santayana. At the turn of 20th century he taught philosophy at Harvard before leaving his post to travel and examine society and or humanity. He definitively shaped the minds of many including TS Elliot, Gertrude Stein, Walter Lippmann, W.E.B. Du Bois, Harry Austryn Wolfson amongst countless others.
Here are some of Santayana's other famous words that resonate empirical with me... enjoy
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
"Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them."
"It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation."
"Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind."
"Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good."
"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment."
"The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice."
"Art like life should be free, since both are experimental."
"The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
"I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty."
"There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval."
gnunat:
Excellence.