What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someoneβs company you love them.
Iris MurdochRead
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Interpretation
Art serves as an expression of humanity's deepest concerns and fears, often acting as a diversion from confronting the divine or existential truths.
This quote by Iris Murdoch suggests that art is a profound and clever manifestation of the human spirit, crafted not just for beauty, but as a means to evade facing uncomfortable truths about existence and the divine. It highlights the complexities of the human condition, where individuals may find solace and meaning in artistic expression rather than confronting the often daunting nature of reality or spirituality.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions about the role of art in society during an exhibition.
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someoneβs company you love them.
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
The more dollars the studio producers put in, the less freedom we have. If the budget hits $100m, they get scared - they'll take the existing score of a successful movie and expect composers to copy it, like wallpaper. The biggest challenge for any composer in Hollywood is to be as creative as possible within those boundaries.
Why do people compose music? Why do people listen to music? When we go into a concert, we go into a place where we want to experience a sort of ecstasy, to come out of ourselves.
There's something about the sound of a train that's very romantic and nostalgic and hopeful.
Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.
Through performance, I found the possibility of establishing a dialogue with the audience through an exchange of energy, which tended to transform the energy itself. I could not produce a single work without the presence of the audience, because the audience gave me the energy to be able, through a specific action, to assimilate it and return it, to create a genuine field of energy.
Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.
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