I saw that everything famous and beautiful in the world, if we judge by the descriptions and drawings of writers and artists, always loses when we go to see it and examine it closely.
--
History of My Life (trans. Trask 1967), 1997 reprint, vol. 11, chap. 4, p. 112Giacomo Casanova (Jacques Casanova de Seingal)
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It is Vesalius' Anatomy of Birth -- a book of drawings and diagrams of human anatomy. Beautiful drawings but -- as the pages turn -- terrible in their frankness...
Peter Greenaway
All descriptions of reality are limited expressions of the world of emptiness. Yet we attach to the descriptions and think they are reality. That is a mistake.
Shunryu Suzuki
The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and though there be no one to look at it. In other words, although the beautiful exists for the gratification of an observer, it is independent of him. In this sense music, too, has no aim (object), and the mere fact that this particular art is so closely bound up with our feelings by no means justifies the assumption that its aesthetic principles depend on this union.
Eduard Hanslick
Before he did all those lovely line drawings, Matisse would make really detailed charcoal drawings and tear them up. He wouldn't leave them about, he thought of them as working drawings. I understand what he was doing: discovering what's there. And then when you come to use line, if you know what you're looking at, it's much easier to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution to what you want to depict.
David Hockney
A smart daughter ought not to examine her future husband too closely. She ought to consider it a pleasure to find one agreeable to her father.
Alain-Rene Lesage
Casanova, Giacomo (Jacques Casanova de Seingal)
Casares, Adolfo Bioy
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