Voices of the Muses

“For me there is no pleasure so great as to promote and to pursue my art.”

“A word is dead / When it is said, / Some say. / I say it just / Begins to live / That day.”

“Your daily life is your temple and your religion. Whenever you enter into it take with you your all.”

“The condition and characteristic of an uninstructed person is this: he never expects from himself profit (advantage) nor harm, but from externals. The condition and characteristic of a philosopher is this: he expects all advantage and all harm from himself.”

“Let us cherish and love old age; for it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it.”

“An ideal carries no extrinsic assurance that its realisation would be a benefit.”

“the photoplay tells us the human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely, space, time, and causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world, namely, attention, memory, imagination, and emotion.”

“are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all?”

“the winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.”

“I’d very much like to see Millet reproductions in schools, I think there would be children who became painters if only they saw good things.”

“This man, who took no joy in the ways of his brethren — who cared not for conquest, and fretted in the field — this designer of quaint patterns — this deviser of the beautiful — who perceived in Nature about him curious curvings, as faces are seen in the fire — this dreamer apart, was the first artist.”

“I’m always inclined to believe that the best way of knowing God is to love a great deal. Love that friend, that person, that thing, whatever you like, you’ll be on the right path to knowing more thoroughly, afterwards; that’s what I say to myself. But you must love with a high, serious intimate sympathy, with a will, with intelligence, and you must always seek to know more thoroughly, better, and more.”