It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
--
Letter to H.G. Wells (10 July 1915)Henry James
Such complicated and apparently unnecessary behavior leads philosophers, both amateur and professional, to ask over and over again, "Why can't human beings live simply and naturally?" Often the complexity of human life makes us look enviously at the relative simplicity of such lives as dogs and cats lead. But the symbolic process, which makes possible the absurdities of human conduct, also makes possible language and therefore all the human achievements dependent upon language. The fact that more things can go wrong with motorcars than with wheelbarrows is no reason for going back to wheelbarrows. Similarly, the fact that the symbolic process makes complicated follies possible is no reason for wanting to return to a cat-and-dog existence. A better solution is to understand the symbolic process so that instead of being its victims we become, to some degree at least, its masters.
S. I. Hayakawa
Everything made is made either by art or by a physical process or according to some power. Now in art or nature the maker must needs be prior to the made: but the maker, according to power, constitutes the made absolutely together with itself, since its power is inseparable from it; as the sun makes light, fire makes heat, snow makes cold.
Now if the Gods make the world by art, they do not make it be, they make it be such as it is. For all art makes the form of the object. What therefore makes it to be?Sallustius (or Sallust)
Music bypasses the intellect, it makes you laugh, makes you cry, makes you want to dance, makes you want to have sex.
Siobhan Fahey
Perhaps the most fundamental value of a liberal education is that it makes life more interesting.
It allows you to think things which do not occur to the less learned ... it makes it less likely that you will be bored with life.Kingman Brewster
I'm not Machiavellian. I don't play chess with my life, you know. I respond in the moment, which is what makes me a good actor. It makes me, sometimes, a good interview subject but it also makes me a very easy target.
Russell Crowe
James, Henry
James, Cheryl
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