Quotes
“They did not seek momentary acclaim or notoriety--but what is very different--they sought to achieve something of permanent value. Their aim was not the transient satisfaction of astonishing or shocking; it was to achieve something that would remain in men’s memories and demand to be recalled. For them it was not the passing moment in a man’s life that counted, but what he actually was, in the very depths of his being”- Jacques Maroger, 1948.
“All sublime feelings are...feelings of exaltation and expansion of the mind, tending to rapture and enthusiasm; and whether they be excited by the sympathy with external objects, or arise from the internal speculations of the mind, they are still of the same nature. At grasping at infinity, the mind exercises the powers...of multiplying without end; and, in so doing, it expands and exalts itself, by which means its feelings and sentiments become sublime.” -Payne Knight, 1806.
“...all my being was eased and brought into unity in the joy of inspiring contemplation” -Holderlin, 1797
“Beauty is prior to knowledge, but it’s the striving for knowledge that cultivates an appreciation for beauty…[Beauty] Can only be recognized in all its completeness and clarity when one has found one’s way through the labyrinth of knowledge and only then, having keenly missed one’s homeland, arrived in the quiet land of beauty.”-Holderlin.
"By giving higher meaning to the mundane, a mysterious appearance to the normal, the distinction of the unknown to the known, the guise of infinity to the finite, I romanticize it.”-Novalis.
“To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.”-Novalis.
"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars -- mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern -- of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? "-Richard Feynman, 1983.
