I believe in God, mozart and beethoven…I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, individual Art…I believe that through this Art all men are saved, and therefore each may die of hunger for Her…I believe…that true disciples of high Art will be transfigured in a heavenly veil of sun-drenched fragrance and sweet sound, and united for eternity with the divine fount of all Harmony. may mine be the sentence of grace! Amen!
Richard Wagner
Fortunate is he who at an early age knows what art is.
Goethe
The artist ought to believe in art and rely upon art, and live in it, for in the palace of the soul are many mansions, and his is not the least capacious nor the least permanent, whilst we are all aware that it is certainly not the least beautiful.
Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Thoughts About Art
I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star….alas! The time is coming when man will give birth to no more stars. alas! The time of the most contemptible man is coming, the man who can no longer despise himself. behold! i shall show you the Last Man. ‘what is love? what is creation? what is longing? what is a star?’ thus asks the Last Man and blinks….’we have discovered Happiness,’ say the Last Men and blink.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A work of art that truly achieves ‘fulfillment’ will never be surpassed; it will never grow old. the individual can assess its significance for himself personally in different ways. but no one will ever be able to say that a work that achieves genuine ‘fulfillment’ in an artistic sense has been ‘superseded’ by another work that likewise achieves ‘fulfillment.’
Max Weber, Science as a Vocation
It might be a basic characteristic of existence that
those who would know it completely would perish,
in which case the strength of a spirit should be
measured according to how much of the “truth”
one could still barely endure.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Where the spirit of man comes into harmony with a harmony external to it, there is beauty.
Carleton Noyes
The better you come to know something you love in itself, the better you understand how it differs from everything else, how it does something that has never been done before. but the better you understand that, the more other things you need to know in order to compare them to what you love and to distinguish it from them. and the better you know those things, the more likely you are to find that some of them, too, are beautiful, which will start you all over again in an ever-widening circle of new communities and new things to say. it is a dangerous game, pursuing the beautiful. you may never be able to stop.
Alexander Nehamas, An Essay on Beauty and Judgment
I will destroy the existing order of things which divides mankind into hostile nations, into strong and weak, into those with rights and those without, into rich and poor, for this order simply makes wretches of all. I will destroy the order of things which makes millions into slaves of the few, and these few into slaves of their own paper and their own wealth. I will destroy this order of things which divides work from enjoyment, which makes work a burden and enjoyment a vice, and renders one man miserable through want and the other miserable through excess. I will destroy this order of things which consumes men’s strength in the service of the dominion of the dead, of lifeless matter which keeps half of mankind inactive or engaged in useless activity, which compels hundreds of thousands to devote the flower of their youth in busy indolence to the preservation of this damnable state of affairs as soldiers, officials, speculators and financiers, while the other half has to sustain the whole shameful edifice at the cost of the exhaustion of their powers and the sacrifice of any enjoyment of life. I will wipe from the face of the earth every trace of this crazy order of things, this compact of violence, lies, worry, hypocrisy, poverty, misery, suffering, tears, deceit and crime which fathers an occasional burst of impure lust, but almost never a ray of pure joy.
Richard Wagner (German Composer), The Revolution
The truths of mathematics…were established by god and entirely depend on him, as much as do all the rest of his creatures. …you will be told that if god established these truths he would be able to change them, as a king does his laws; to which it is necessary to reply that this is correct…in general we can be quite certain that god can do whatever we are able to understand, but not that he cannot do what we are unable to understand. for it would be presumptuous to think our imagination extends as far as his power.
Rene Descartes