But ne'er the subject of your work proclaim In its own colors and its genuine name; Let it by distant tokens be conveyed, And wrapped in other words, and covered in their shade. At last the subject from the friendly shroud Bursts out, and shines the brighter from the cloud; Then the dissolving darkness breaks away, And every object glares in open day. Thus great Ulysses' toils were I to choose For the main theme that should employ my Muse, By his long labors of immortal fame Should shine my hero, but conceal his name; As one who, lost at sea, had nations seen, And marked their towns, their manners, and their men, Since Troy was leveled to the dust by Greece- Till a few lines epitomized the piece.
Marco Girolamo VidaRelated topics
choose cloud darkness day dissolving dust employ fame few friendly great greece hero men last lost muse name open piece sea seen shade should shine theme thus till work wrap manners wordsRelated quotes
My countrymen, though not in any partisan sense, I must speak of the services of the men and women who rallied to the colors of the Republic in the World War. America realizes and appreciates the services rendered, the sacrifices made, and the sufferings endured. There shall be no distinctions between those who knew the perils and glories of the battlefront or the dangers of the sea, and those who were compelled to serve behind the lines, or those who constituted the great reserve of a grand army which awaited the call in camps at home. All were brave. All were self-sacrificing. All were sharers of those ideals which sent our boys twice armed to war.
Warren G. Harding
The relationship of volumes, lines, and colors demands absolute orchestration and order. These values are all unquestionable influential; they have extended into modern objects such as airplanes, automobiles, farm machines, etc. Today we are in competition with the 'beautiful object'; it is undeniable. Sometimes its plastic qualities make it beautiful in itself and consequently unusable; one can only fold one's arms and admire it. There is also today an astonishing art of window display. Certain store windows are highly organized spectacles... If, pushing things to extremes, the majority of manufactured objects and 'stored spectacles' were beautiful and had plasticity, we artists would no longer have any reason to exist.
Fernand Léger
My convictions, positive and negative, on all the matters of which you speak, are of long and slow growth and are firmly rooted. But the great blow which fell on me seemed to stir them to their foundation, and had I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me and them - and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind? To which my only reply was and is - Oh devil! Truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.
Thomas Henry Huxley
In the office there are about fifteen people whose attention is directed toward a table covered with the costly fabric [raw cotton]; one man is bent over the table and another is sort of seating on it – the buyer and the broker are discussing a sample. A painting of a vernacular subject, if there is such a thing, and I think by a better hand than most others (a size 40 canvas, I think). I'm planning another less complicated and more surprising yet, better art, in which everyone is in summer dress, the walls white, and a sea of cotton on the tables. (translation based on M. Kay's, in M. Gérin [ed.] and M. Kay, transl. 'Degas letters', Oxford, 1947, pp. 29-30, no. 2.
Edgar Degas
Many nights I stood on the bridge - and in the middle alone - lost - a defenseless prey to the surrounding swarming darkness - crushed by the mountainous black impenetrability of the skyscrapers - here and there lights resembling suspended falls of astral bodies or fantastic splendors of remote rites - shaken by the underground tumult of the trains in perpetual motion, like blood in the arteries-at times, ringing as alarm in a tempest, the shrill sulphurous voice of the trolley wires - now and then strange moanings of appeal from tugboats, guessed more than seen, through the infernal recesses below - I felt deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new DIVINITY.
Joseph Stella