Simply Art

....He who would sail the sea of life must become a navigator; he must learn to reckon with wind and tide, with laws and limits. A Columbus does not flout the laws, he extends them. Nor does he set sail for an imaginary world. He discovers a new world accidentally. But such accidents are the legitimate fruits of daring. This daring is not recklessness but the product of inner certitude.
— Henry Miller, Time of the Assassins, p. 141.

.... Life is the infinite domain of the possible. The idol of the many arms, the dance of death, these are not at all allegories of the perpetual flux of the universe. They are beings, impregnated with an inhuman life which has made those arms necessary. They should be contemplated as giant crustaceans brought up from the depths of the sea are contemplated. Both are disconcerting to us, show us suddenly how much simplicity there is in us, inspire in us the idea of an existence without ties to our own. But the former are only figures with weapons made of sand, while the others are superhuman intercessors.
— André Malraux, The Temptation of the West, p. 86.

If you will not hear reason, she will surely rap your knuckles.
— Benjamin Franklin

The passage from intuition to reflection, from knowledge of the real to expression of that knowledge in viable form is always precarious and difficult. It is, in short, a kind of translation, not from one language into another, but from one state of existence into another, from the receptive into the creative, from the purely sensuous impression into the purely reflective and cultural act.
     This gap, of course, is simply another representation of the mind-body gap, which all idealist philosophers and mechanists are so eager to get rid of: the first by abolishing the body and the second by abolishing the mind. Unfortunately, though they can contrive this abolition easily enough in words, it remains very definite to our experience.
— Joyce Cary, Art and Reality, p. 42.

     This is an old tale. The child genius goes to school and becomes a dull man. What we have to ask is why this conflict occurs; if it is inevitable, how anything real can pass the gap between intuition and the expression, the work of art; and, in short, whether art is not, as dictators like to believe, purely subjective and fantastic, the dangerous amusement of a lot of egotistic parasites.
— Ibid., p. 45.

It appeals very strongly to that deep and strange passion which we find in every generation for what is called the return to nature. Every day we hear abuse of civilization and all its culture by the simple-lifer who wants to live like Thoreau and put off the corruption of the world. But Thoreau was a highly educated man. The real simple-lifer, the aboriginal, leads a very hard life by rules and tabus far more oppressive than those of any citizen of London or New York. It is the man of culture, the scholar, who really simplifies his life. It is only the very wise and learned men who have the freedom of a quiet mind, and they do not achieve it by running away from civilization, and denouncing its culture and its scholarship.
— Ibid., p. 53.

I am an acme of things accomplished, and I am encloser of things to be.
— Walt Whitman