Deeds Quotes - page 25
There are some upon this earth of yours, returned the Spirit, who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all out kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.
Charles Dickens
The real world with its common logic pushes us toward catastrophe. The artists seek in his work to free himself from this weight. Art is being transformed into politics, love into trade, education into an apparatus for stifling the mind. In the midst of such horrors, clearly only the dream within me has life. But how do other people live? -There is color, virginal expression - new, without a cage, without routine, without limit, a bath of sun and light. We must realize that nothing man does is of any value. The trouble is that people want to be paid. Only sick men can be artists. Their suffering pushes them into the accomplishment of deeds which reinvest the world with meaning. The sensitive man or the artist can only be a sick man in our civilized life, so full of lies. To think of art as a profession, how appealing!
Bram van Velde
How sweet is praise, and justly purchased glory,
By one's own actions, when to Heaven they soar!
Each nobler soul will strain, to have his story,
Match, if not darken, all that went before.
Envy of other's fame, not transitory,
Screws up illustrious actions more, and more.
Such, as contend in honorable deeds,
The spur of high applause incites their speeds.
Luís de Camões