A Quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness and opacity. All that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality transfiguration and transparency.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made.
cut off from the intuitive knowledge of ontological reason, technical knowledge is directionless and ultimately meaningless. When it dominates, life is deprived of an experience of depth, and it tends toward despair.
'The Expats' is a thriller, but one that tends more toward general fiction than toward breathless pulp.
As you begin to feel this enormous shift of consciousness, called multisensory perception, emerging in your awareness, you begin to reorient yourself. It's a reorientation that occurs toward yourself as more than a mind and a body; it's a reorientation that occurs toward others; toward your life as meaningful, rather than predetermined. It's a reorientation that occurs toward the universe as alive, wise and compassionate, instead of inert (which means dead) and random.
Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such the autonomous movement of non-life.
We must move from ... the primacy of technology toward considerations of social justice and equity, from the dictates of organizational convenience toward the aspirations ofself realization and learning, from authoritarianism and dogmatism toward more participation, from uniformity and centralization toward diversity and pluralism, from the concept of work as hard and unavoidable, from life as nasty, brutish, and short toward work as purpose and self~fulfillment, a recognition of leisure as a valid activity in itself.
Experts are able to identify patterns related to a specific problem relevant to their area of knowledge. But because nonexperts lack that base of knowledge, they are forced to rely more on their brain's ability for abstraction rather than specificity.
The last, best fruit which comes to late perfection, even in the kindliest soul, is tenderness toward the hard, forbearance toward the unforbearing, warmth of heart toward the cold, philanthropy toward the misanthropic.
When you want to direct someone toward the good, first put him at peace bodily and honor him with words of love. For nothing inclines such a man to shame and induces him to cast of his vice and be changed for the better as do bodily goods and honor, which he sees in you. Then, with love tell him a word or two, and do not be inflamed with anger toward him. Do not let him see any cause of enmity toward you. For love does not know how to lose its temper.
Let us be Christians toward our fellow-whites, as well as philanthropists toward the blacks our fellow-men. In all things, and toward all, we are enjoined to do as we would be done by.
Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around it comes to you; stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. So act toward children, so toward a wife, so toward office, so toward wealth.
I do think American culture has shifted a little bit away from the contemplative more toward the visual, more toward the emotional, and more toward the expressive. I don't think there's a lot that can be done about that. We just have to understand that it's the product of technology and of the way people live now.
People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.
My art tends toward the literary. My pictures tend toward the outskirts of painting: But why generalize? It is possible to realize one thing or another, according to the impressions gained from one point of view or another. But it is too difficult to make a general rule.
Life, this anti-entropy, ceaselessly reloaded with energy, is a climbing force, toward order amidst chaos, toward light, among the darkness of the indefinite, toward the mystic dream of Love, between the fire which devours itself and the silence of the Cold.
Most people have turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it.
Related Authors
Charles Bukowski Quotes
American
Novelist
Charles Dickens Quotes
English
Novelist
Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
American
Novelist
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
American
Novelist
F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
American
Novelist
George Eliot Quotes
British
Novelist
George Orwell Quotes
British
Novelist
George R. R. Martin Quotes
American
Novelist
Jane Austen Quotes
British
Novelist
Margaret Atwood Quotes
Canadian
Novelist
Nicholas Sparks Quotes
American
Novelist
Paulo Coelho Quotes
Brazilian
Novelist
Sarah Dessen Quotes
American
Novelist
Stephenie Meyer Quotes
American
Novelist
Veronica Roth Quotes
American
Novelist
Victor Hugo Quotes
French
Novelist