Eric Spreng

“The literary critic Helen Vendler writes that “treating fictions as moral pep-pills or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realizes the complex psychological and moral motives of a work of art.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“image works as particularity, not as generalization. That is how art school changed my thinking about history and how visual art set me free.”
― Nell Irvin Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

“In Brueghel’s hands, Ovid’s tale of a son’s willful rejection of his father’s wisdom becomes a story about the need for a kind of humility—for, you might say, perspective; an admonition about what we miss when we are intent on our own narratives, about the dangers of mistaking the foreground for the whole picture.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“Stories can elicit compassion on a case-by-case basis, but they can also lead us to question our moral principles and our habits of behavior. As the psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, “Exposure to worlds that can be seen only through the eyes of a foreigner, an explorer, or a historian can turn an unquestioned norm (‘That’s the way it’s done’) into an explicit observation (‘That’s what our tribe happens to do now’).”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil