Imagine Quotes - page 96
My dear Theo, Thanks for your letter of this morning. Yesterday I saw the Corot exhibition. It included a painting of the 'Mount of Olives'; I'm glad he painted that. On the right, a group of olive trees, dark against the darkening blue sky; in the background hills covered with shrubs and a couple of tall trees, above them the evening star.... I've also seen the Louvre and the Luxembourg, as you can imagine. The Ruisdaels in the Louvre are magnificent, especially 'The bush', 'The breakwater' and 'The ray of sunlight.
Vincent van Gogh
What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the first black man in history to imagine that he could become president, who was able to make other Americans believe it as well. Other than that, he is a centrist, just like I try to be. He's been bridging divisions his whole life.
Henry Louis Gates
The mathematic, then, is an art. As such it has its styles and style periods. It is not, as the layman and the philosopher (who is in this matter a layman too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject like every art to unnoticed changes form epoch to epoch. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics.
Oswald Spengler
Put yourself in the position of an up-and-coming artist living in early-sixteenth-century Italy. Now imagine trying to distinguish yourself from the other artists living in your town: Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, or Titian. Is it any wonder that the Italian High Renaissance lasted only 30 years?
Jerry Saltz
If the Frieze Art Fair catches on, I imagine at least two great things happening. First, we will once again have a huge art fair in town that isn't too annoying to go to. More importantly, Frieze may finally show New Yorkers that we can cross our own waters for visual culture. That would change everything.
Jerry Saltz
Hasn't there ... been a little too much zeal in our reproof of children and friends for yielding to the temptations we ourselves find it most difficult to resist? We punish where we can least afford to sympathize. Of all the horrors of the daily news, it seems hardest to imagine the kind of cruelty that is intensified by the pain of its victims, but whenever we feel sympathy would weaken us, we are a little closer to the torturer.
James Richardson
I'm surprised that multiple personalities are so much less common in reality than in fiction: what a little disorder it would take, a distraction, a sleep, for one of our minor characters to imagine he was the star, to speak out for everyone else. And that's what it would be, a change of billing, not of authorship. For you do not write your play-you are just the character in it called The Playwright. The real writer, you never meet.
James Richardson
Look at why Jesus strictly avoided speaking the language of the theologians of his day. It's plain to see what an enormous liberation there lies in hearing something about God in the words of poetry. Imagine that we would speak about God in the music of Mozart and Beethoven or in the pictures of van Gogh... It would be impossible to fight wars over the true faith in the Name of Mozart or van Gogh... The language of poetry, the parables of Jesus, is international. You can't and mustn't pour them into dogmas.
Eugen Drewermann
