“The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference.”
~ Oscar Wilde; irish author, poet, playwright, critic and aesthete.
“‘The Civilized’ murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell themselves out of poverty. This improvident paternity is a false virtue, the selfishness of pleasure.”
~ Charles Fourier; french utopian socialist and philosopher.
“You live in a deranged age – more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, Mankind has not the faintest idea of who He is or what He is doing.”
~ Walker Percy; american author and philosopher.
“Men have called me mad; but the question is not settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest of intelligence…”
~ Edgar Allen Poe; american author, critic, and poet.
“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.”
~ Truman Capote; american author, journalist and critic.
“A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.”
~ Albert Camus; french author, journalist and philosopher.
“smart people don’t exist… we alternate certain stupiditys.”
~ deacon khet; american poet, philosopher and murderer of classical literature…
“Any man who does not have his inner world to translate is not an artist.”
~ Theophile Gautier; french poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art and literary critic.
“The text is a product in the sense that it is an output, something that can be recorded and studied, having a certain construction that can be represented in systematic terms. It is a process in the sense of a continuous process of semantic choice, a movement through the network of meaning potential, with each set of choices constituting the environment for a further set.”
-said in 1985 as cited in: Xueyan Yang (2010) Modelling Text As Process. p.20
~ M.A.K. Halliday; british linguist.
“Unless a man has pity he is not truly a man. If a man has not wept at the worlds pain he is only half a man, and there will always be pain in the world, knowing this does not mean that a man shall despair. A good man will seek to take pain out of things. A foolish man will not even notice it, except in himself, and the poor unfortunate evil man will drive pain deeper into things and spread it about wherever he goes.”
~ William Saroyan; armenian-american dramatist and author.