The painters have every advantage over us today...Besides being able to tear up their failures-we never can seem to grow ivy fast enough-their materials cost them nothing. They have no committees of laymen telling them what to do. They have no deadlines, no budgets. We are all sickeningly familiar with the final cuts to our plans at the last moment. Why not take out the landscaping, the retaining walls, the colonnades? The building would be just as useful and much cheaper. True, an architect leads a hard life-for an artist.
Philip JohnsonRelated topics
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Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able to cross those final barriers to the intellect, goes right on.
Stanisław Lem
Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.
Václav Havel
Conditions to the north of us, in the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts zone of action, and our offensive on Kharkov demands that we not lose time and we commit all forces so that we can draw off as many divisions as possible from Kharkov. And even if we do not draw them off, at least we will not give Manstein the ability to take any of his units from our part of the front. If we attract one or two German tank divisions - it will be the best contribution to the defeat of the enemy in the south.
Aleksandr Vasilevsky
I certainly wouldn't compare the rewards of watching one's children grow and mature with that of money piling up at the box office. Both are pleasant, but to varying degrees. As the old saying goes, you can't take an audience home with you. You can't depend on the loyalty of fans, who, after all is said and done, are just faceless people one seldom sees. And few stars have their fans forever. But a child is forever. That bond and relationship is timeless and doesn't depend on your looks, age or popularity at the moment.
Julie Andrews
Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe. The painter's art is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally engaged. What is done by Painting, must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have.
Joshua Reynolds