Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.
Interpretation
Beauty is subjective and can't be reduced to mere facts or quantities.
Wendell Berry's quote emphasizes that beauty transcends objective measurements and empirical verification. It suggests that beauty resides in personal perception and interpretation, highlighting its complex and intangible nature that cannot be neatly categorized or quantified.
In practice
Discussing art with friends at a gallery opening.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impressions in front of the most fugitive effects.
Acting, to me, is about the incredible adventure of examining the landscape of human heart and soul. That's basically what we do.
Everyone who gave me food, who took away my hunger, inspired me to compose. They told me their stories, and I had no other way to console them than with a piece of music, and that is how I learned. I did not resolve their problems with my songs, but I created a moment of release.
You don't have to be singing specifically about things that are going on in your life, but because of the nature of music, because it is this incredibly emotional phenomenon, everything that you are feeling or experiencing is relayed in the music you put out.
I'm not a wildly gifted person; I don't play an instrument or speak another language or have great accomplishments in another field, as many writers do. But writing feels natural to me; the act of it seems to free up my unconscious, so that sometimes I feel that I have access to more ideas and information than my conscious mind could think up.
What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.
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