A Quote by H. L. Mencken
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
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The truth is . . . that the great artists of the world are never puritans, and seldom ever ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man - that is, virtuous in the YMCA sense - has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman.
But Zarathustra made it clear in which direction the answer lay; it is towards the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. There are very few such men in the world's literature; the great artists are not thinkers, the great thinkers are seldom artists.
The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn't be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans; in the New World, of course, they could and did.
Great artists are modest almost as seldom as they are faithful to their wives.
Puritans will never believe it, but life is full of disagreeable things that aren't even good for you.
Once avant-garde artists receive official recognition, they start a double life. In one, they inspire younger artists to do more. In the other, they inspire a mass of imitators who make the work respectable and exclusionary. The artists and their art become intellectual brand names.
For spiritual companions I have had the many artists who have relied on nature to help shape their imagination. And their most elaborate equipment was a deep reverence for the world through which they passed. Photographers share something with these artists. We seek only to see and to describe with our own voices, and, though we are seldom heard as soloists, we cannot photograph the world in any other way.
One of the great, truly extraordinary privileges of being an actor is to interact with individuals from all walks of life, you know, from avocations that you wouldn't ordinarily interact with or people you wouldn't ordinarily interact with.
Bad artists ignore the darkness of human existence. Good artists often get stuck there. Great artists embrace the full catastrophe of our condition and find beyond it an even deeper truth of peace, healing, and redemption.
No group of people has been more unjustly maligned in the twentieth century than the Puritans. As a result, we approach the Puritans with an enormous baggage of culturally ingrained prejudice.
It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results.
Just as the great composer is seldom also a great player, so is the great mathematician seldom also a great teacher.
What is great about art and artists is that we get to ask the questions, even though we may never know the answers.
Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.
What do great artists do when you see a world around you that's in turmoil? Some of the best artists make you feel good (hah), they look to the future.
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