Reads tagged with “books”

Susan Sontag on the Perils of Publicity in Creative Work

“Publicity in general is a very destructive thing, for any artist.”

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George Orwell on Writing and the Four Questions Great Writers Must Ask Themselves

“By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.”

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How Repetition Enchants the Brain and the Psychology of Why We Love It in Music

“Music takes place in time, but repetition beguilingly makes it knowable in the way of something outside of time.”

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Georgia O’Keeffe on Art, Life, and Setting Priorities

“Anyone with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least.”

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Petunia, I Love You: A Forgotten 1965 Children’s Book Treasure

A sweet and irreverent reminder that kindness is the most potent antidote to evil.

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John Dewey on the True Purpose of Education and How to Harness the Power of Our Natural Curiosity

“While it is not the business of education … to teach every possible item of information, it is its business to cultivate deep-seated and effective habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions.”

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The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Reimagined in Minimalist Graphics by Italian Illustrator Olimpia Zagnoli

Precision, bold geometric shapes, and repetitive patterns that somehow amplify rather than dull the psychedelic sensibility of Baum’s whimsical world.

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Sherwin Nuland on the Art of Dying and How Our Mortality Confers Meaning Upon Our Lives

“The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it.”

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Walt Whitman, Bohemian Dandy: The Story of America’s First Gay Bar and Its Creative Coterie

“A failed romance. A restless sense of longing… These are raw ingredients that get mulled, weighed, processed — and ultimately transformed into art.”

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The Life of the Mind: Hannah Arendt on Thinking vs. Knowing and the Crucial Difference Between Truth and Meaning

“To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions [would be to] lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”

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Reads tagged with “books”

“Publicity in general is a very destructive thing, for any artist.”

“By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.”

“Music takes place in time, but repetition beguilingly makes it knowable in the way of something outside of time.”

“Anyone with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least.”

A sweet and irreverent reminder that kindness is the most potent antidote to evil.

“While it is not the business of education … to teach every possible item of information, it is its business to cultivate deep-seated and effective habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions.”

Precision, bold geometric shapes, and repetitive patterns that somehow amplify rather than dull the psychedelic sensibility of Baum’s whimsical world.

“The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it.”

“A failed romance. A restless sense of longing… These are raw ingredients that get mulled, weighed, processed — and ultimately transformed into art.”

“To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions [would be to] lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”

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