Both Sides — Now

What matters in the end, both for values and for art, is the depth of life as a felt thing; and it is this, and not some intellectual explanation, that is lost whenever we say that the meaning of life has been lost. And if our young writers now experience the life around them as meaningless, it is this meaning they have lost.
— William Barrett, "American Fiction and American Values," in The American Novel Since World War II, by Marcus Klein (ed.), pp. 62.

The theme of art is the theme of life itself. This artificial distinction between artists and human beings is precisely what we are all suffering from. An artist is only someone unrolling and digging out and excavating the areas normally accessible to normal people everywhere, and exhibiting them as a sort of scarecrow to show people what can be done with themselves.
— Lawrence Durrell, in Writers at Work: Paris Review Interviews, Second Series, Van Wyck Brooks (ed.), pp. 276-277.

The volume of judgments one is called upon to make depends upon the receptivity of the observer, and if one is very receptive, one has a terrifying number of opinions to render — ....I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
— Saul Bellow, in Ibid., p. 190.

     As Blake wrote in his Vision of the Last Judgment: "'What,' it will be Question'd, 'When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a guinea?' 'O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, "Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God Almighty!" I Question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro' it, and not with it.'"
     It is part of the poet's work to give each man his own view of the world — show him what he sees but does not know that he sees. The poet, like the painter, harmonizes what seems to the "Vegetative Eye" irreconcilable aspects of the world, into a great design, a great balance. He shows the quintessence of reality. In Carl Jung's words, "Imagination is a concentrated extract of all the forces of life."
— From "The Poet's Vision," by Edith Sitwell, in Adventures of the Mind (Saturday Evening Post essays), p. 109.

     The theological standpoint of Nicholas [of Cusa, 1401-1446] is set forth in his work De Docta Ignoranta, which has nothing to do with the absurdity of erudition, as its name might be thought to imply, but concerns itself with man's essential incapacity to attain to absolute truth. It was followed by the De Conjecturis, in which he comes to the conclusion that all knowledge is but conjecture and that man's wisdom is to recognise that he can know nothing. From this attitude of apparently pure scepticism he escapes by the mystic way. God, about whom we can know nothing by experience or reasoning, can be apprehended by a special process (intuition), a state in which all intellectual limitations disappear. We need follow Nicholas no further on his theological path, but we may remark that he seems dimly to have foreseen the approaching clash between the scientific and the religious standpoints, and that he solved the difficulty in the way chosen by many other scientific men since his day. He accepted the existence of two forms of experience: an outer, subject to natural law, about which we can reason, and an inner, which has no relation to such law and is above and beyond reason.The position, if rigidly maintained, is quite impregnable from the scientific side. Between it and science there could never be any real conflict.
— From "10. The Close of the Middle Ages," of Historical Relations of Religion and Science, by Charles Singer, in Science, Religion & Reality, by Joseph Needham (ed.), p. 129.