+
,,

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)
,,

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)
,,

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.
Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth!
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882.
,,

Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
“Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les homes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among ‘the children of the world,’ in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterred or others, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”

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

,,

It is the addition of strangeness to beauty, that constitutes the romantic character in art.
Walter Pater,The Renaissance  (via stodgo)
,,

As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection.
Oscar Wilde (via mycolorbook)
,,

It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions… The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life.

Excerpt of “La Gioconda,” from Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, describing Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa

Never have I loved a piece of criticism as much as Pater’s. Beautifully written as to give justice to great works of art. I may not agree with Oscar Wilde on some things, but Pater’s great decadent essays should be savored.  

(via livelymind)

,,

The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.
Victor Hugo - Les Misérables (via decembrist)

(Source: decembrist)

,,

All monsters have their fits of depression.
Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus (via frenchtwist)
,,

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

-Prince Hamlet
William Shakespeare
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
(Act 3, scene 2, 17–24)

Echoing the classical authors, Hamlet’s passage stresses the playwright’s presentation of dramatic action in a verisimilar manner, without exaggeration or distortion, without bombast or excessive sentimentality. In the theatrical mirror we see our virtues and vices reflected back to us in their true shape: that’s the theater’s moral function.

Oscar Wilde, in The Decay of Lying (1899-1901) references this passage in  his essay not in support of realism in art, but as a trite, erroneous device used by critics who lack imagination and the appreciation of lying:

“No doubt there will always be critics who…will gravely censure the teller of fairy tales for his defective knowledge of natural history, who will measure imaginative work by their own lack of any imaginative faculty… To excuse themselves they will try and shelter under the shield of him who made Prospero the magician…They will call upon Shakespeare — they always do — and will quote that hackneyed passage forgetting that this unfortunate aphorism about Art holding the mirror up to Nature, is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince the bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matters.”

,,

Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (IV, vii)