Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
Samuel ButlerRead
The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.
Interpretation
Funding is crucial for the creation of art and literature, just as it is in warfare.
This quote by Samuel Butler emphasizes that financial resources are fundamental to the production and sustenance of art and literature. Just as armies require money to equip themselves for war, artists and writers need financial backing to create their works, highlighting the intimate connection between economics and creative expression.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of arts funding, I might quote Butler to emphasize the financial challenges artists face.
Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him.
Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.
An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.
People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.
I will say only that all a writer has to work with is the material he has gathered as the result of his own endeavor and observations, and he cannot be denied the right to use it. Condemn, but not deny.
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.
There are two kinds of designers: ones who are very happy locked in their office surrounded by their coterie. The last thing they need to do is to go to a trunk show; they'd go running for the hills. I not only enjoy it, I think, how do you design things that are applicable to life - unless you live it?
Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!
The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance, the farther there is to go and the more there is to say, the less time there is to say it.
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