"I'd like to understand why it seems normal to look at astonishing achievements made by unapproachably ambitious, luminously pious, strangely obsessed artists, and toss them off with a few wry comments..."

--

Source : James Elkins (2005). “Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings”, p.6, Routledge

James Elkins

#Artist Quotes #Achievement Quotes #Ambitious Quotes

“Life is neither comedy or tragedy, life is what you make of it.”
“Bright youth passes swiftly as a thought.”
“I believe in the ability of focusing strongly in something, then you are able to extract even more out of it. It's been like this all my life, and it's been only a question of improving it, and learning more and more and there is almost no end. As you go through you just keep finding more and more. It's very interesting, it's fascinating.”
“Promises to get beyond partisanship are the most perfunctory sort of campaign rhetoric, almost as empty as the partisanship itself.”

Source : "Bipartisanship Is a Silly Beltway Obsession" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 22, 2009.
“The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.”
“I can imagine no society which does not embody some method of arbitration.”
“What we learn to do, we learn by doing.”
“Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.”

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