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These contemporary Orientalist attitudes flood the press and the popular mind. Arabs, for example, are thought of as camel-riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth is an affront to real civilization. Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being. […] a white middle-class Westerner believes it his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it, just because by definition “it” is not quite as human as “we” are.
Edward Saïd (via phantomwise)
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We are to assume that if an Arab feels joy, if he is sad at the death of his child or parent, if he has a sense of the injustices of political tyranny, then those experiences are necessarily subordinate to the sheer, unadorned, and persistent fact of being an Arab.
Edward Saïd (via phantomwise)
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The myth of the pleasures of primitive, exotic other is characterized, as Michel Leiris recounts, as ‘a locale of uninhibited sponteneity, an uncensored and libidinous space functioning as the antithesis to the moribund intellectualism of the subject of modernity.’

Carole Sweeney, From Fetish to Subject: Race, Modernism and Primitivism, 1919-1935, 2004.

(As quoted in Michel Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme, 1934, 54.)

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What a long Calvary an artist’s life is! And that’s perhaps what makes us go on living. Passion gives life, and we die when it’s no longer nourishing. Let’s abandon these paths lined with thorny bushes, although they have their savage poetry…
Letter from Paul Gauguin to Vincent van Gogh (Brittany, 7 - 9 September 1888)
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I don’t know any poetic ideas; it’s probably a sense I’m lacking. I find everything poetic, and it’s in the corners of my heart, which are sometimes mysterious, that I perceive poetry. Led harmoniously, forms and colours in themselves produce poetry. Without letting myself be surprised by the motif, I feel a sensation in front of someone else’s painting that brings me to a poetic state, depending on the painter’s intellectual forces, which emanate from it.
Paul Gauguin
Letter to Vincent van Gogh
Brittany, 7 - 9 September 1888
“It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.”

—Blaise Pascal, Pensees. 348.

Letter from Paul Gauguin to Vincent van Gogh (Pont-Aven, July 1888)

How little importance exactness is in art.
Art is an abstraction, unfortunately one becomes more and more misunderstood. I would really like that we reach our goal: that is to say my journey to Provence. I always had the fancy to interpret the bullfights in my own way, as I understand them. I am starting to get the freedom of my faculties: my illness had weakened me and in my last studies I think that what I have done up to now is out of date.
Naturally this band of pigs here find me quite mad, and I that rather pleases me because it proves to me that I am not.
…I don’t know why, but for about ten days I have painted a lot of madness in my head that I intend to execute in the Midi: I believe that is because of my state of health, which is flourishing again. I have a need of struggle; to carve with a club. After all the research that I have just done here I believe it will help me to go better than before.

Until we are together, an affectionate handshake,
Paul Gauguin.

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The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.
Oscar Wilde (via anachronisticfairytales)
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Has there, moreover, ever been a phallic power? This entire history of patriarchal domination, of phallocracy, the immemorial male privilege, is perhaps only a story. Beginning with the exchange of women in primitive societies, stupidly interpreted as the first stage of woman-as-object. All that we have been asked to believe - the universal discourse on the inequality of the sexes, the theme song of an egalitarian and revolutionary modernity (reinforced, these days, with all the energies of a failed revolution) - is perhaps one gigantic misunderstanding. The opposite hypothesis is just as plausible and, from a certain perspective, more interesting - that is, that the feminine has never been dominated, but has always been dominant. The feminine considered not as a sex, but as the form transversal to every sex, as well as to every power, as the secret, virulent form of in-sexuality. The feminine as a challenge whose devastation can be experienced today throughout the entire expanse of sexuality. And hasn’t this challenge, which is also that of seduction, always been triumphant?
Jean Baudrillard, Seduction (1979)
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My heart seemed to purge itself of its own accord…For this I couldn’t even blame the laws of nature, although I have always resented the laws of nature more than anything else all my life.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground (via c-ovet)
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With thee conversing I forget all time,
All seasons and their change, all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower,
Glistering with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
Of grateful evening mild, then silent night
With this her solemn bird and this fair moon,
And these the gems of heav’n, her starry train:
But neither breath of morn when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds, nor rising sun
On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flower,
Glistring with dew, nor fragrance after showers,
Nor grateful evening mild, nor silent night
With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon,
Or glittering starlight without thee is sweet.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
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Here and there, under rare and happy conditions, in Pointed architecture, in the doctrines of romantic love, in the poetry of Provence, the rude strength of the middle age turns to sweetness; and the taste for sweetness generated there becomes the seed of the classical revival in it, prompting it constantly to seek after the springs of perfect sweetness in the Hellenic world. And coming after a long period in which this instinct had been crushed, that true “dark age,” in which so many sources of intellectual and imaginative enjoyment had actually disappeared, this outbreak is rightly called a Renaissance, a revival.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (via notitatall)
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It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems
“To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.”

—Walter Pater, The Renaissance, Studies in Art and Poetry. “Conclusion.”