Alexandra

“I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.”
― George Eliot

“What? We feel aesthetic pleasure at a sonata by Beethoven and not at one with the same style and charm if it comes from one of our own contemporaries? Isn't that the height of hypocrisy? So then the sensation of beauty is not spontaneous, spurred by our sensibility, but instead is cerebral, conditioned by our knowing a date?
No way around it: historical consciousness is so thoroughly inherent in our perception of art that this anachronism (a Beethoven piece written today) would be spontaneously (that is, without the least hypocrisy) felt to be ridiculous, false, incongruous, even monstrous. Our feeling for continuity is so strong that it enters into the perception of any work of art.”
― Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts

“Why, what's the matter,
That you have such a February face,
So full of frost, of storm and cloudiness?”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“You become what you think about all day long.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson