Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.
Interpretation
Beauty is found in the balance of contrasting elements, such as good and bad.
This quote by Yevgeny Zamyatin suggests that true beauty comes from harmony, which can exist between opposites. The interplay of plainness and vice, as well as virtue and beauty, creates a harmonious whole, emphasizing that artistic expression involves embracing both sides of the spectrum to reveal a deeper aesthetic appeal.
In practice
In a gallery opening, this quote can be showcased to emphasize the dual nature of art in representing both beauty and flaws.
The knife is the most durable, immortal, the most genius thing that man created. The knife was the guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox - the single most worthy path of the fearless mind.
The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy...
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A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.
Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.
You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.
I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original.
I want to tell a story that makes the reader always want to see what will happen next.
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.
I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.
You know, be an actor because you love to act. Don't be an actor because you think you're going to get famous, because that's luck.
Each color lives by its mysterious life.
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