Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.

Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

And in the end it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

And in the end it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope read more

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing.

Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he read more

Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.

The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find read more

The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof.

It is not good to have an oar in everyone's boat.

It is not good to have an oar in everyone's boat.

Every year of my life I grow more convinced that it is wisest and best to fix our attention on read more

Every year of my life I grow more convinced that it is wisest and best to fix our attention on the beautiful and the good, and dwell as little as possible on the evil and the false.

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.