A Quote by Wilhelm von Humboldt
All situations in which the interrelationships between extremes are involved are the most interesting and instructive.
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No man will subject himself to the ridicule of pretending that any natural connection subsists between the sun or the seasons, and the period within which human virtue can bear the temptations of power. Happily for mankind, liberty is not, in this respect, confined to any single point of time, but lies within extremes, which afford sufficient latitude for all the variations which may be required by the various situations and circumstances of civil society.
I find it most remarkable that we who are so intimately involved in the battle between good and evil are even more involved with the shades of gray in between them.
The gnosis of God is intermediate between immoderation, which is ascribing human characteristics to God, and negligence, which is denying any attributes to God. . . The Truth lies in the balance between the two extremes.
I write about situations that are common, universal might be more correct, in which my characters are involved and from which only faith can redeem them, though often the actual manner of the redemption is not immediately clear. They sin, but there is no limit to God's mercy and because this is important, there is a difference between not confessing in fact, and the complacent and the pious may not realize it.
That extremes beget extremes is an apothegm built on the most profound observation of the human mind.
'The Decay Of Lying' is a very interesting treatise. It was actually penned as a dialogue between two characters, Cyril and Vyvyan, both of who were named after Wilde's sons. Wilde goes on to extrapolate art as a science and as a social pleasure, to its most logical and illogical extremes, and it ends up being very funny, indeed.
The true secret of natural goodness lies in the recognition of the contending rights of the Pairs of Opposites; there is no such antimony as between Good and Evil, but only balance between two extremes, each of which is evil when carried to excess, both of which give rise to evil if insufficient for equipoise.
The desire of perfection became the ruling passion of their soul; and it is well known, that while reason embraces a cold mediocrity, our passions hurry us, with rapid violence, over the space which lies between the most opposite extremes.
Every virtue is a mean between two extremes, each of which is a vice.
People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.
...after my first feeling of revulsion had passed, I spent three of the most entertaining and instructive weeks of my life studying the fascinating molds which appeared one by one on the slowly disintegrating mass of horse-dung. Microscopic molds are both very beautiful and absorbingly interesting. The rapid growth of their spores, the way they live on each other, the manner in which the different forms come and go, is so amazing and varied that I believe a man could spend his life and not exhaust the forms or problems contained in one plate of manure.
Do you ask what sort of a maid I desire or dislike, Flaccus? I dislike one too easy and one too coy. The just mean, which lies between the two extremes, is what I approve; I like neither that which tortures nor that which cloys.
I've had to deal with all different types of situations - positive and negative and extremes of both.
The most interesting character to me is someone who is stuck in the no man's land between Belief and Unbelief, Faith and Faithlessness. I'm capitalizing like a German, but it doesn't matter whether it's faith in a person or in God, or belief in science or whatever, it's the desperate in-between state that makes for interesting dramatic tension.
The relations which exist between man and his Maker, and the duties resulting from those relations, are the most interesting and important to every human being and the most incumbent on his study and investigation.
For me anyway when a photograph is interesting, it's interesting because of the kind of photographic problem it states - which has to do with the contest between content and form.
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