Here is what I was trying to figure out: how a miracle happens. A great work of art -- something that makes people pay attention, return to the work again and again, and reexamine their assumptions, something that infuriates, hurts, and confronts -- ...
Again, all of life presents us with two basic ways to treat events. We can either label them "god for us" or "bad for us." The event is only an event. It's how we treat the event that determines what it becomes in our lives. The event doesn't make th...
Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of qu...
Dad?" "What?" A small bird rises from a tree in front of us. "What should I be when I grow up?" The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don't know what to say. "Honest," I finally say.
John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I'm working on parts. I'm working on c...
There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were no...
A photograph can show a physical image in which time is static, and a mirror can show a physical image in which time is dynamic, but I think that what he saw on the mountain was another kind of image altogether which was not physical and did not exis...
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium b...
The thing about being an artist," Dad said, folding his newspaper and setting it down on the table, "is that there are always going to be people who want to stop you from doing your art. But this usually says more about them and their issues than it ...
He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring?...
Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging lan...
What art does is give us the refinement, all the shades of meaning, of emoting, that we don’t have language for. What fascinates me about that is we’re talking about an art form in which your medium is language. It’s almost a paradox that you�...
As long as art is understood and valued as an “absolute” activity, it will be a separate, elitist one. Elites presuppose masses. So far as the best art defines itself by essentially “priestly” aims, it presupposes and confirms the existence o...
The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics. The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them,...
When I was ten years old, my dad and brother did judo, so I went along because I felt like I was missing out. They eventually gave up, and I continued, then moved into Tae Kwon Do, kickboxing and various other martial arts. I did lots of different th...
Great art comes from passion, from a need to expose human spirit in the face of mortality, the small cruelties and heroisms that make up daily life -- that's where great work comes from, and if you enable students in this way to discover those impuls...
I’ve said for years — ever since I figured out how to write Goblin Hero — that it’s important to give yourself permission to write crap. Perfection is the destroyer of art. It’s paralyzing. Art, whether it’s writing or painting or anythin...
Dean McCoppin: Sorry about the crowbar, kid. You'd be surprised how many people want to steal scrap. But, man, once I make it into art, I can't give it away. I mean, what am I? A junkman who makes art or an artist who sells junk? You tell me.
Ulysses Everett McGill: What'd the devil give you for your soul, Tommy? Tommy Johnson: Well, he taught me to play this here guitar real good. Delmar O'Donnell: Oh son, for that you sold your everlasting soul? Tommy Johnson: Well, I wasn't usin' it.
Tommy Johnson: I had to be up at that there crossroads last midnight, to sell my soul to the devil. Ulysses Everett McGill: Well, ain't it a small world, spiritually speaking. Pete and Delmar just been baptized and saved. I guess I'm the only one tha...
Ulysses Everett McGill: Say, uh, Cousin Wash, I suppose it'd be the acme of foolishness to inquire if you had a hair net. Washington Hogwallop: Got a bunch in yon bureau, Mrs. Hogwallop's as a matter of fact [sniff] Washington Hogwallop: . Help y'sel...