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"Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also."
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"The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."
"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
"Freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art."
"And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of IlAovatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide ad beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow from which its beauty chiefly came."
"Most critics, fond of subservient artstill make the whole depend upon a part.They talk of principles, but notions prizeAnd all to one loved folly sacrifice."
"One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin."
"Art and the artist meet in stages, slowly revealing themselves until both are satisfied with what the other has become."
"A picture is a voiceless poem, a poem is a vocal picture."
"It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around."
Explore more quotes by Charles Horton Cooley
"If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted."
"There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point."
"Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling."
"The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self."
"There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time."
"So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational."
"Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture."
"As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it."
"Institutions - government, churches, industries, and the like - have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction."
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