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“Instead of linking an active life and an affirmative thinking, thought gives itself the task of judging life, opposing to it supposedly higher values, measuring it against these values, restricting and condemning it. And at the same time that thought thus becomes negative, life depreciates, ceases to be active, is reduced to its weakest forms, to sickly forms that are alone compatible with the so-caIled higher values. It is the triumph of "reaction" over active Iife and of negation over affirmative thought.”
― Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life
― Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life
“How can we doubt that it is his art that explains the artist, and not the insufficiencies and conflicts of his personal life? These are nothing but the regrettable results of the fact that he is an artist—that is to say, a man who from his very birth has been called to a greater task than the ordinary mortal. A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.”
― Modern Man in Search of a Soul
― Modern Man in Search of a Soul
“The world will ask who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.”
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“It is the seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong.”
― The Courage to Create
― The Courage to Create
“But, as Sir Herbert Read remarks in his Concise History of Modern Art, metaphysical anxiety is no longer only Germanic and northern; it now characterizes the whole of the modern world. Read quotes Klee, who wrote in his Diary at the beginning of 1915: “The more horrifying this world becomes (as it is in these days) the more art becomes abstract; while a world at peace produces realistic art.” To Franz Marc, abstraction offered a refuge from the evil and ugliness in this world. “Very early in life I felt that man was ugly. The animals seemed to be more lovely and pure, yet even among them I discovered so much that was revolting and hideous that my painting became more and more schematic and abstract.”
― Man and His Symbols
― Man and His Symbols
Max’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Max’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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